What is Auxiliary Percussion?
Auxiliary percussion — sometimes referred to as ancillary percussion, toys, or sound effects — includes many of the smaller percussion instruments and those particularly that are not standard to the orchestra. Using the standard categories for typing percussion instruments, we can say that most auxiliary percussion instruments are either aerophones — instruments that create sound using air — or idiophones — instruments that create sound through the material they are made of, not through the application of an external sound-making tool, like a bow or a reed.
