This is a wide-ranging, inclusive list of

percussion instrument A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Exc ...

s. It includes: * Instruments classified by Hornbostel–Sachs as struck or friction

idiophone An idiophone is any musical instrument that creates sound primarily by the vibration of the instrument itself, without the use of air flow (as with aerophones), strings ( chordophones), membranes ( membranophones) or electricity ( electroph ...

s, struck or friction

membranophones A membranophone is any musical instrument which produces sound primarily by way of a vibrating stretched membrane. It is one of the four main divisions of instruments in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification. ...

or struck

chordophone String instruments, stringed instruments, or chordophones are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner. Musicians play some string instruments by plucking the s ...

s. Where an instrument meets this definition but is often or traditionally excluded from the term ''percussion'' this is noted. * Instruments commonly used as unpitched and/or untuned percussion. * Instruments commonly part of the

percussion section The percussion section is one of the main divisions of the orchestra and the concert band. It includes most percussion instruments and all unpitched instruments. The percussion section is itself divided into three subsections: * Pitched percus ...

of a

band Band or BAND may refer to: Places *Bánd, a village in Hungary *Band, Iran, a village in Urmia County, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Band, Mureș, a commune in Romania *Band-e Majid Khan, a village in Bukan County, West Azerbaijan Province, I ...

orchestra An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...

. These three groups overlap heavily, but inclusion in any one is sufficient for an instrument to be included in this list. However, when only a specific subtype of the instrument qualifies as a percussion instrument, only that subtype is listed here. For example, a samba whistle (or ''apito'') is an unpitched percussion instrument, but a

whistle A whistle is an instrument which produces sound from a stream of gas, most commonly air. It may be mouth-operated, or powered by air pressure, steam, or other means. Whistles vary in size from a small slide whistle or nose flute type to a lar ...

in general is not. For brevity,

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are al ...

s represented in Wikipedia by

redirects Redirect and its variants (e.g., redirection) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Redirect'', 2012 Christian metal album and its title track by Your Memorial * ''Redirected'' (film), a 2014 action comedy film Computing * ICMP Re ...

to a main article are not listed, but may be mentioned as a note. Only the main article names are listed in these cases. For example,

apito Apito, which is the Portuguese word for "whistle", refers to any of a variety of whistles. Purpose The apito de samba ("samba whistle") is used during performances of samba. In a samba school, the apito de samba plays a crucial role because du ...

is listed but samba whistle is merely noted as an alternate name. A distinct instrument or type represented only by a redirect to an article section should however be shown. Instruments represented only by redlinks have no Wikipedia articles as yet but are shown. See list of percussion instruments by type for some shorter, more focused lists. Use the sorting arrows on the ''common usage'' column to group instruments as ''pitched'', ''unpitched'' or ''both''. Use the sorting arrows on the ''Classification'' column to group instruments according to their

Hornbostel–Sachs Hornbostel–Sachs or Sachs–Hornbostel is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in the in 1914. An English translation was published in the '' Galpin Society ...

classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes. It may also refer to: Business, organizat ...

Percussion instruments

References

{{Percussion Articles containing video clips Lists of musical instruments

Percussion instruments

See also

Top-level articles

Subgroups of percussion instruments

Categories

References