Sackbut modern orchestra sounds out of tune, but it tunes perfectly well on in a sackbut choir if everyone plays natural harmonics. Plenty of musical understanding can be gathered from reading the original music print. Publishers such as SPES and Arnaldo Forni Edition provide facsimile copies of plenty of music for trombone from this era. To read these it one needs to become familiar with the old clefs, time signatures, ligatures and notational conventions of the era. The sound of sackbuts (and trombones) has long been thought especially solemn and noble, had an association with death and the afterlife. The instrument
Sackbut don't have water keys, stockings, a leadpipe, or a slide lock, but as these parts are not critical to sound, replicas may include them. Bore size remained variable, as it still is today. The first reference to a slide instrument was probably "trompette des ménestrels", first found in Burgundy in the 1420s and later in other regions of Europe. The name distinguished the instrument from the "trompettes de guerre" (war trumpets), which were of fixed length. The next word to appear in the 15th century that implied a slide was the "sackbut" group of words. There are two theories for