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 Tone holes changed the pitch by providing an intentional leak in the bugle of the instrument. While this changed the pitch, it also had a pronounced effect on the timbre. By using valves to adjust the length of the bugle the tuba produced a smoother tone that eventually led to its popularity. Adolphe Sax, like Wieprecht, was interested in marketing systems of instruments from soprano to bass, and developed a series of brass instruments known as saxhorns. The instruments developed by Sax were generally pitched in E and B, while the Wieprecht "basstuba" and the subsequent Cerveny contrabass tuba were