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Hi, everyone.

♪ Ready, off I go, welcome, everybody ♪ ♪ It's time for us to sing ♪ ♪ Welcome, everybody, it's time for us to sing ♪ ♪ One, two, three, four, five ♪ ♪ Six, seven, eight, nine, 10 ♪ ♪ It's time for us to sing ♪ Join in with me.

He's going to sing you song to you, and you're going to sing it back to him.

I'm going to go first to show you what I mean.

♪ Hickety Tickety Bumblebee ♪ ♪ Can you sing your name to me ♪ ♪ My name's Miss Glover ♪ What's your name? Great.

Let's try.

♪ Hickety Tickety Bumblebee ♪ ♪ Can you sing your name to me ♪ Very good? Let's try one more time.

♪ Hickety Tickety Bumblebee ♪ ♪ Can you sing your name to me ♪ Well done you! Now we're ready to do some learning.

Today we are going to learn to know the instruments of the orchestra, to identify instruments by listening, and to understand which instruments fit into which family and why.

The orchestra is a big group of musicians.

Sometimes over a hundred musicians can be in one orchestra.

Here you can see a map of what the orchestra looks like.

This is a map as if you are a bird looking on top of the orchestra.

The grey circle at the front is closest to the audience.

That's where the conductor stands.

The pink section is where all the string instruments go.

The purple section is the woodwind section.

The blue section are all the brass instruments.

And at the back, the green section would be the percussion.

We're going to learn about all these families of instruments today.

Are you ready? First of all, the conductor.

He's the one on that grey spot at the front.

The conductor is in charge of the orchestra and they use a stick called a baton to tell the musicians what to play and when.

They also help the musicians to know how many beats are in a bar and where the strong beat is just like we've been learning.

The conductor rehearses with the orchestra to get them ready for their performance.

Here you can see the string section.

That's the pink section of the orchestra.

The string section consists of the violin, viola, cello, and double bass.

They are the biggest section of the orchestra and are played by bowing or plucking their strings.

The violin is the highest pitch member of the string section, followed by the viola, the cello, and the double bass is the lowest in pitch.

It's really, really big too.

Here we can listen to an excerpt of a piece of music by Vivaldi, which has lots of string instruments in it.

The bank section is the woodwind section.

That's the purple section of the orchestra.

The woodwind section consists of the flute, clarinet, oboe, and bassoon.

They are hollow tubes, which are played by blowing into them.

Some of them like the clarinet, oboe, and bassoon use a reed to make sound.

That's a little piece of wood that vibrates when you blow across it.

The flute doesn't use that.

The flute is played by blowing across the mouthpiece like you would blow across a bottle.

The flute is the highest member of the woodwind section, but actually there's a mini flute that sometimes appears called a piccolo, that's even higher.

The bassoon is the lowest member of the woodwind section, but actually there's a thing called a contrabassoon, which is like a giant bassoon that sometimes appears, which is even lower.

Here you can listen to some music that has a clarinet in it.

The brass section is a blue section of the orchestra.

The brass section consists of the trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba.

They are played by blowing through a mouthpiece and using valves or slides to change the pitch.

They are all made of metal, sometimes brass, sometimes other types of metal.

That's how they got their name as the brass section.

The tuba is the biggest and lowest member of the brass section.

But my favourite is the trombone, because it slides up and down.

Have a listen to this piece of music.

This is a Trumpet Concerto.

That means the trumpet is the main instrument playing on its own.

Lastly, we have the percussion section, the percussion section sits at the back because they make lots of noise.

They are the green section in this orchestra.

The percussion section is made up of lots of instruments, which are all played by hitting, shaking, scraping, or tapping them.

Some of these are pitched like a xylophone and some unpitched like a drum.

They also have shakers, tambourines, or go-goes, glockenspiels, bells, triangles, so many different instruments can be part of the percussion section, but they are all played by hitting, shaking, scraping or tapping them.

Here we can hear a piece of music by Steve Reich.

This contains lots of percussion.

Have a listen.

Today we have learned about the instruments of the orchestra, to identify instruments by listening and to understand which instruments fit into which family and why.

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