Wessex Tubas Finds Global Resonance: Affordable Professional Brass Instruments with Expert Craftsmanship
In partnership with: PPR
Wessex Tubas, founded in 2012 by tubist Jonathan Hodgetts, makes the pleasure of playing high-quality brass instruments accessible to all. It customizes, designs, and fabricates brass instruments for all ages and abilities, including tubas of various pitches, euphoniums, baritones, cimbassos, sousaphones, helicons, trumpets, trombones, and French horns. Now opening distribution centers in Europe, Wessex Tubas continues to spread the grand tones of beautifully crafted wind and brass instruments for years to come.
Establishing Wessex Tubas
The journey of Wessex Tubas’ founding is a long and twisting one. Its founder and Managing Director Jonathan Hodgetts has played the tuba since he was 12 years old. In his forties, he attended a Tchaikovsky concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall, and his life changed forever. From that day on, his passion for the tuba was reinvigorated with a zeal he hadn’t experienced before, and he began to practice the highest caliber of the instrument’s repertoire. “I really dug down deep and got a lot better as a player,” he recalls.
He met his now-wife in China, and in 2010 while visiting the country, an idea suddenly occurred to him. Jonathan explains, “A brainwave came to me and I wondered if we could manufacture instruments in the factories here. Having a Mandarin speaker, my wife, made the facility selection process much easier and ensured that workers’ rights were being adhered to. So, we started things up.” Wessex Tubas was born in 2011, with one pallet of four tubas that Jonathan sold from the back room in his home in Andover, UK. And yet, these initial four tubas demonstrated the massive untapped potential of affordable high-grade brass instruments, selling to instrumentalists around the world.
Making the music
Today, each instrument is precisely crafted by hand, and professionally tested with ears finely tuned over years of experience, providing the brilliant sounds of brass at approachable rates around the world. With quality and accessibility at the forefront of the company since its inception in 2010, Wessex tubas are renowned as an excellent choice for players of all levels, from beginners and amateurs to leading professionals. It offers tubas through the full range of pitch from BB♭ to F, along with a wide variety of instruments within the brass family.
Specially designed to reflect the virtuosity of each player, the carefully crafted valves, the curved tubes, and deep tones along with the inherent grandiosity of its bell and brass, produce the reverberating atmosphere of each brass horn. Wessex tubas are played by celebrated tubists around the world, from orchestra members and soloists to teachers.
Wessex Tubas against a wavering music scene
The basis and bass of any band or orchestra worth its salt, the tuba stands alone in its ability to move listeners of any genre with the rumbling, rich, sometimes percussive tenors it produces. Now recuperating from the detrimental effects of the pandemic on the music industry, hundreds of thousands of brass instruments are sold each year across the globe as new players begin their education of the largest and lowest wind instrument.
Intended to last a lifetime, each brass piece requires specialized manufacturing processes, materials, and expert craftsmen. The trust, loyalty, and social community that a well-loved instrument fosters are priceless to brands and their investors. That’s why this seemingly obscure corner of the symphony orchestra is valued at $867 million with a compound annual growth rate of 4.5% and is anticipated to reach $1.17 billion in the next six years. As music becomes an increasingly viable option for young musicians to find stable employment or a lifelong passion, more people are pursuing their talents and finding a home within the industry. Especially in the EU, where almost 8 million people work in the arts sector and even more in amateur music-making. In the US sector, statistics show a lower rate of professional music-makers at 5.2 million, compensating for this is a large number of community bands and orchestras.
This flourishing scene of musicians and students looking to be introduced to the brilliance of brass instruments drives Wessex Tubas in its commitment to manufacture accessible, quality horns. As Jonathan notes, “Since the start, our aim is to make available good quality instruments at a reasonable price. Before Wessex Tubas, you would either have to acquire extremely expensive and very good-quality instruments from Europe, or cheap and low-quality instruments from Asia. I wanted to democratize the best of what the instrument can be.”
Playing for the future
The company continues to strive for the finest; testing, re-designing, and refining the quality of its prized instruments every year. In this vein, Wessex Tubas is now fabricating brass instruments with the smoother sounds and increased durability of German brass for its professional-grade instruments, ensuring that a Wessex instrument is a lifelong tool to cherish and make music.
Alongside recent developments, Wessex Tubas is also excited to announce the introduction of woodwind instruments to their offerings in 2025. Additionally, due to increasing demand for high-quality and affordable brass instruments across Europe, the company will open a showroom and distribution hub in València, Spain in the coming year. With many more ears and hearts to reach, Wessex Tubas is dedicated to developing the potential of wind and brass instruments all over the globe.