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
Electronic sackbut Electronic sackbut The electronic sackbut is an instrument designed by Hugh Le Caine in the 1940s. The electronic sackbut had a feature which resembles what has become the modulation wheels on moderen synthesizers: The player used the left hand to modify the sound while the right hand was used to play the keyboard. This compares with today's synthesizers which have one or several modulation wheels to the left of the keyboard (often controlling modulation and pitch). The controller modified volume, pitch, and timbre. Thus it was one of the first electronic instruments to use a three-dimensional continuous controller to modify