What are different types of musical instruments? Our Musical Flashcards can help you learn!

Have you ever wondered what a violin and a cello have in common, or why a flute and a clarinet sound different? Our Musical Instrument Flashcards can help you learn about the musical instrument families and practice your music listening skills. Below, we’ve included additional resources to help young musicians learn about the musical instrument families. Download and print our free flashcards and puzzle search, and become a maestro of the orchestra with our game suggestions and paired activities.

There are many different musical instruments that are arranged into families based on their characteristics, such as how they produce sound, what they’re made of, and how they are played. You can learn more with Inside the Orchestra, a website offering educational listening games to help you identify the different sounds of each instrument. This site also includes memory games for matching instruments together, puzzles, and orchestra bingo.

How to use the music instrument flashcards

You can use our double-sided flashcards for identifying and naming common instruments in Western music. With a partner and resources like Inside the Orchestra and Classics for Kids, students can also practice identifying which instrument is playing by pointing to an instrument card. Additionally, students can practice with the word search. Name the instrument from an illustration and find it on the page. We recommend printing double-sided on card stock, so that your flashcards can be used over and over again!

Flashcard Game:

1.) Lay out all cards with word side facing down.

2.) Players 1 and 2 take turns naming an instrument, then turning over the card to see if they have used the correct term.

2a.) alternate version: Player 1 plays an instrument recording from Inside the Orchestra and Player 2 points to the card for the instrument that played.

3.) Player gets to keep the card only if they named the instrument correctly. When all cards are gone, the player with the most cards wins.

How to identify music instruments: Learn about Instrument Families below

The musical instrument families include strings, keyboards, brass, woodwinds, percussion, and electronic instruments. Each family produces sound vibrations in different ways, which gives each instrument family unique characteristics. Our printable instrument flashcards can help students drill the instrument families as well as learning the names of the instruments! One fun game might be to see how quickly a student can organize the cards into the correct families.

Stringed instruments are commonly made of wood and have strings that are bowed, plucked, or struck to produce the vibrations that create the sound. Examples of string instruments include the guitar, mandolin, violin, cello, harp, cimbalom, and even the piano! The piano is an interesting instrument because it can fit into many different categories, like the keyboard instruments below.

Keyboard instruments are a varied family of instruments that all include keyboards, which is a row of levers that are usually played with the fingers. The piano is a keyboard instrument that is also a string instrument. Inside the piano are strings which are stretched out over a frame and a small hammer strikes them to produce the sound. Another type of keyboard instrument is the pipe organ, which creates sound by blowing air through large pipes. Other keyboard instruments include the harpsichord, harmonium, celeste, carillon, and the accordion. The carillon is the most interesting keyboard instrument, because instead of playing it with your fingers, you play it with your fists!

Brass instruments are instruments that create sound by the buzzing of the player’s lips through a conically-shaped mouthpiece, which is then amplified by the instrument itself. Some brass instruments create pitch by pressing valves (such as the trumpet) or moving a slide to the correct placement (such as the trombone). Other bass instruments include the tuba, the horn (or french horn), the serpent, and even the didgeridoo!

Woodwind instruments are instruments that are played by blowing through a mouthpiece. Some woodwind instruments’ mouthpieces have a single reed which vibrates when blown through, such as the clarinet and saxophone. Others are double-reed instruments, such as the bassoon, English horn, oboe, and bagpipes. The flute and piccolo create sound when the player blows over the mouthpiece opening, similar to blowing into a glass bottle to make a musical pitch. The recorder creates sound when the player blows through a stiff mouthpiece and a notch that follows it, called a fipple. Whistles also play via fipples.

Percussion instruments are the oldest instrument family and include instruments that create sound by being struck, shaken, or scraped. Pitched-percussion instruments can play multiple pitches while unpitched-percussion instruments cannot. Pitched-percussion instruments include the marimba, xylophone, vibraphone, timpani, bells, chimes, and even the piano. Unpitched-percussion instruments include the triangle, bass drum, snare drum, and rainstick.

Electronic instruments are any instrument that creates sound through the use of electronic circuits. These include the electric piano/keyboard, synthesizer, theremin, electric organ, and ondes Martenot.

Is there an app that tells you what instrument is playing?

With the advent of AI, apps can tell you what instrument is playing. With that said, you don’t need an app! You can learn to identify which instrument is playing by getting to know the musical instruments better through our musical instrument flashcards and active listening tools.

Another example of a website you can pair with the flashcard games is Classics for Kids, which shares examples of how every instrument sounds! Within the families, see if you can differentiate between different instruments, like the oboe or the clarinet. Listen to the timbre (the quality of the sound) of each instrument. Are there different pitches? Does it sound like the instrument is struck or shaken to create the sound? If there aren’t different pitches and it sounds like it could be struck or shaken, it’s probably an unpitched-percussion instrument, like a drum. If it sounds like an instrument that’s blown through and the tone is nasal and reedy, it could be a bassoon or a bagpipe. Listen and ask yourself what characteristic describes each sound and pretty soon, you’ll be able to tell each instrument apart from another.

We hope you enjoyed our collection of exercises with our Printable Instrument Flashcards! At Hoffman Academy, we believe in making musical progress and having fun, which is why we create learning games and resources for pianists all around the world! Visit Hoffman Academy’s Learning and Teaching Resources in our Online Store for more printable flashcards and games to make musical practice even more fun!