Music · Curated list
Guitar, Piano, Violin and 27 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the instrument's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
Fretted string instrument
A string instrument, usually fretted, that normally has six or twelve strings, though there are guitars with seven, eight and nine. The player usually holds it flat against the body; the dominant hand strums or plucks, and the fingers of the other hand press chosen strings down against the frets.
Wikidata · Photo: Martin Möller, CC BY-SA 2.0 de
2
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument that sounds when its keys are pressed, setting off an action in which hammers strike strings. Modern pianos have 88 keys, black and white, in a row, except for Stuart & Sons and Bosendörfer pianos, and are tuned in equal temperament to the chromatic scale.
Wikidata · Photo: Steinway & Sons, 10 Rondenbarg, Hamburg D-22525, Germany, eu.steinway.com . Steinway & Sons, 1 Steinway Place, Long…, CC BY-SA 3.0
3
Bowed string instrument
Sometimes called a fiddle, a wooden chordophone, the smallest instrument of the violin family in regular use and so the highest in pitch (soprano). Smaller instruments of the violin type exist, such as the pochette and the violino piccolo, but they are hardly ever played.
Wikidata · Photo: Just plain Bill, CC0
4
5
6
Brass instrument
An instrument of the brass family. Its commonest form transposes, in B♭, so that its notes sound a whole step below how they are written.
Wikidata · Photo: PJ , background cropped by EWikist, CC BY-SA 3.0
7
Bellows-driven free-reed aerophone musical instrument
A family of box-shaped instruments: bellows-driven free-reed aerophones. What defines an accordion is that one instrument joins a melody part, the diskant, normally played on a keyboard with the right hand, to an accompaniment or basso continuo worked by the left hand.
8
Percussion instrument
A percussion instrument, an idiophone that is struck directly. Most bells are shaped like a hollow cup that, when struck, rings with one strong strike tone, its sides acting as an efficient resonator.
Wikidata · Photo: William Henry Stone, Public domain
9
10
Single-reed woodwind instrument
A woodwind instrument with a single reed, an almost cylindrical bore and a flared bell.
Wikidata · Photo: Firma Herbert Wurlitzer Manufaktur für Holzblasinstrumente GmbH, D-91413 Neustadt an der Aisch, bearbeitet von / edited…, CC BY 4.0
11
Bowed string instrument
Short for violoncello, a bowed string instrument of the violin family with a medium-low pitch. Its four strings are normally tuned in perfect fifths, from lowest to highest C₂, G₂, D₃ and A₃.
Wikidata · Photo: Georg Feitscher, CC BY 3.0
12
Plucked string instrument
A string instrument whose strings run at an angle to its soundboard and are plucked with the fingers. It can be played sitting or standing.
Wikidata · Photo: Eacquahdennis, CC BY 4.0
13
Wind instrument controlled by keyboard
An instrument that sounds by driving air under pressure through organ pipes chosen from a keyboard. Since each pipe gives just one tone and pitch, pipes come in sets called ranks, each sharing one timbre, loudness (volume) and construction across the keyboard's compass.
14
Free reed wind musical instrument
Also called the mouth organ or French harp, a free-reed wind instrument played around the world in many kinds of music, notably rock, country, jazz, classical music, American folk and blues. Its many types include bass, orchestral, octave, tremolo, chromatic and diatonic versions.
Wikidata · Photo: George Leung, CC BY-SA 3.0
15
Plucked-string keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument whose strings are plucked to make its sound. Pressing a key lifts its far end inside the instrument, which raises one or more jacks: thin strips of wood, each carrying a small plectrum of plastic or quill that plucks one string.
Wikidata · Photo: Ratigan (instrument et photo), CC BY-SA 3.0
16
Bowed string instrument
A string instrument of the violin family, usually played with a bow, a little bigger than the violin and lower in sound.
Wikidata · Photo: Just plain Bill, Public domain
17
Brass instrument
An instrument of the brass family. As in all brass, the player's lips vibrate in a mouthpiece, which makes the column of air inside the instrument vibrate.
Wikidata · Photo: Yamaha Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0
18
Electrical string musical instrument
A guitar that, unlike an ordinary acoustic guitar, needs an external electric amplifier to be heard at normal performance volume. One or more pickups turn the strings' vibrations into electrical signals, and loudspeakers finally reproduce these as sound.
Wikidata · Photo: francesco from Italia, CC BY 2.0
19
Double-reed woodwind instrument
A woodwind instrument with a double reed, usually made of wood, though some are made of synthetic materials such as hybrid composites, resin or plastic.
Wikidata · Photo: Gebrüder Mönnig, Markneukirchen, CC BY-SA 4.0
20
Electric plucked string instrument
Also called the electric bass, the guitar family's lowest-pitched member. It looks and is built much like an electric guitar, though its neck and scale length are longer.
21
Bowed string instrument
Known by many names, among them the upright, acoustic or string bass, the bass or bull fiddle, the contrabass or just the bass: the biggest, lowest-pitched chordophone of today's symphony orchestra. With four or five strings, it is built in a way between the violin family and the gamba (viol).
Wikidata · Photo: User:AndrewKepert, CC BY-SA 3.0
22
Musical instrument in the lute family
A string instrument of the lute family, usually plucked with a pick. Most often it has four courses of paired strings tuned in unison, eight strings in all.
Wikidata · Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Arent assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0
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23
Wooden keyboard percussion instrument
A percussion instrument made of wooden bars struck with mallets. Every bar is an idiophone giving one note of a scale: pentatonic or heptatonic in many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many Western ones for children, and chromatic for orchestras.
Wikidata · Photo: David Adam Kess, CC BY-SA 4.0
24
Musical instrument consisting of a collection of percussion instruments
Also called a drum set or acoustic drum kit, a set of percussion instruments laid out for one musician to play. It usually includes cymbals and drums, and sometimes extra percussion such as a cowbell or tambourine.
Wikidata · Photo: Danel Solabarrieta, CC BY-SA 2.5
25
Brass instrument
A large brass instrument in the bass-to-contrabass range. It belongs to the valved bugles, a large, varied family known for a wide conical bore and valves that change the pitch.
Wikidata · Photo: Buffet Crampon, CC BY-SA 4.0
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26
Woodwind instrument
A woodwind instrument whose enclosed reeds are fed with air from a constant reservoir, a bag. The Great Highland bagpipe of Scotland is well known, but bagpipes have been played for centuries across much of Europe, North Africa and West Asia, around the Persian Gulf and in the north of South Asia.
Wikidata · Photo: Lucas Kendall, CC BY-SA 4.0
27
Lamellophone instrument
Also called the jaw harp, juice harp or mouth harp, a lamellophone: a flexible tongue or reed of metal or bamboo fixed to a frame. Whatever its common name suggests, it most likely began in China, where the oldest known examples, from Shaanxi, are 4,000 years old.
28
Electronic musical instrument
An electronic instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers usually make sounds by generating waveforms with methods such as frequency modulation, additive and subtractive synthesis.
Wikidata · Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Fataltourist~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain
29
Double-reed woodwind instrument
A woodwind instrument playing in the bass and tenor ranges, built of six pieces and usually made of wood.
Wikidata · Photo: Gregory F. Maxwell < gmaxwell@gmail.com > PGP : 0xB0413BFA, GFDL 1.2
30
Brass instrument
A brass instrument of the horn family: a coil of tubing, with rotary valves and a big flaring bell. French horn properly means horns with piston valves, rarely used now; professional orchestras and bands mostly play the double horn in F/B♭, a kind of German horn, though the triple and descant horns are gaining ground.
Every Wikidata item that is a kind of musical instrument, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 30 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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