Tuba after American bandmaster John Philip Sousa, resembles a hélicon with the bell pointed up (in the original models as the J. W. Pepper prototype and Sousa's concert instruments) and then curved to point forward (as developed by Conn and others). Some ancestors of the tuba, such as the military "bombardon", had unusual valve and bore arrangements compared to modern tubas. During the American Civil War, most brass bands used a branch of the brass family known as "saxhorns", which, by today's standards, have a narrower bore taper than tuba—the same as true cornets and baritones, but distinct from trumpets, euphoniums,
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