Marching brass 1980s and early 1990s, DEG Music Products commissioned Willson Brass of Switzerland to design a Euphonium bugle, and their design used a medium shank mouthpiece that is not regularly seen in the United States. The contrabass bugle, or "contra", is the bugle equivalent of a marching tuba and its variants (the sousaphone and helicon). This bugle was designed in the 1960s. The original design for a contrabass called for an instrument in CC (the equivalent tubing length of a CC tuba), carried in front of the marcher like the higher voices. This was quickly replaced with a shoulder carried variant
Tuba lowest pitched tubas are the contrabass tubas, pitched in C or B, referred to as CC and BB tubas respectively, based on a traditional distortion of a now-obsolete octave naming convention. The fundamental pitch of a CC tuba is 32 Hz, and for a BB tuba, 29 Hz. The CC tuba is used as an orchestral, and concert band instrument in the U.S., but BB tubas are the contrabass tuba of choice in German, Austrian, and Russian orchestras. In the United States, the BB tuba is the most common in schools (largely due to the use of BB sousaphones in