Jason Bradwell's 365/366 Photo a Day Blog

A tenor trombone contains a whole 9 feet of tubing. Add on a standard F-attachment (pictured here), and you're up to 12 feet of brassy goodness. The first carnation of the contrabass trombone during the Renaissance had a whopping 24' of tubing!

The word trombone derives from Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name literally means "large trumpet". Trombones and trumpets share the important characteristic of having predominantly cylindrical bores. Therefore, the most frequently encountered trombones — the tenor and bass trombone — are the tenor and bass counterparts of the trumpet. They are both pitched in B♭ — with the slide all the way in, the notes of the harmonic series based on B♭ can be played — but trombones generally read music in concert pitch.