The slide chart — but with a moving slide

A trombone has no buttons to press. Seven slide positions, no click stops, no markings on the instrument — the player measures distance by feel. Tap a note to see where the slide goes. Each position is roughly 8 cm further from the body.

Primary slide positions for a tenor trombone in Bb without trigger. Many notes have valid alternate positions in higher partials — pros choose them for legato passages or for tuning. Synth tone is approximate; a real trombone has the slide flexibility no oscillator captures.

The trombone was chromatic 350 years before any other brass instrument

For most of brass history, the trumpet, horn and tuba couldn't play a complete scale. They were stuck on the harmonic series of whatever length of tubing they happened to have. That changed in 1814, when Stölzel and Blühmel patented a workable valve mechanism in Prussia.

The trombone had solved that problem in the mid-15th century. The instrument was then called the sackbut — from the Spanish sacar (to draw out) and bucha (tube). It looked almost exactly like a modern tenor trombone, except smaller-bored and softer-toned. A slide mechanism, properly used, gives a complete chromatic scale across the instrument's range. The sackbut was the only brass instrument that could do that, and for almost 400 years it had the whole job to itself.

By the time valves arrived, the sackbut had grown into the louder, larger-bore trombone of the Classical and Romantic orchestra. Beethoven was the first major composer to score for it in a symphony — the finale of the Fifth, written 1808. Brahms, Schubert and Wagner cemented its orchestral role. By 1900 the slide had been improved but not replaced. It is still the only mainstream brass instrument without buttons.

The 9 trombone types in working use

From highest to lowest. Bore size matters as much as length — a bass trombone has the same total tubing as a tenor with the trigger engaged, but a much wider bore.

The Renaissance sackbut is still played, but only in period-instrument ensembles. It would be a tenth member if you count it — the line between "sackbut" and "narrow-bore baroque trombone" is blurry.

The one sound only a trombone can make

The trombone can do something no other brass instrument can: glide smoothly from one note to any other note inside a slide position's range. No discrete steps, no fingerings to change. The pitch is continuous.

That is the trombone glissando. You hear it in the opening of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924) — the clarinet starts it, but the iconic slide back down was a Paul Whiteman Orchestra trombone improvisation. You hear it any time a cartoon character looks foolish. And you hear it as a kind of structural joke in New Orleans "tailgate" jazz, where the trombonist sat on the back of a horse-drawn wagon and the slide simply needed room.

Three trombones that escaped music school

For an orchestral instrument with no permanent place in pop, the trombone has an unusually wide pop-culture footprint.

The six players who shaped the instrument

Tap a card to read more.

The trigger — a small valve on a slide instrument

Most modern professional tenor trombones, and almost all bass trombones, carry one or two triggers — small rotary valves operated by the left thumb. Engaging a trigger routes the air through an extra loop of tubing, lowering the instrument's pitch by a fourth (or, on a bass with a second trigger, by a further fifth or sixth).

The trigger solves a geometry problem. Without it, the player would have to extend the slide an extra half-metre to reach low B2 — physically impossible from a normal seated position. The F-attachment makes those notes reachable in a comfortable slide position, and gives the player alternate positions for fast legato passages that would otherwise require an awkward slide jump.

The first trigger trombones were built in the 1830s in Germany. They became standard equipment for orchestral tenor players by about 1950. The slide chart above is for a trombone without the trigger engaged — the trigger creates its own seven-position chart in F, which most players also memorise.

The valve trombone — the instrument that gave up the slide

A few years after valves arrived in 1814, an obvious question came up: why not put them on the trombone? A valve trombone is exactly that. Three piston valves replace the slide. The fingerings are essentially trumpet fingerings, an octave lower. The slide and its limitations vanish.

And so does the trombone's defining feature. A valve trombone cannot produce a true glissando, cannot bend between notes the way a slide does, and never quite has the slide trombone's broad voice. It survives mostly in jazz — Juan Tizol used one in Duke Ellington's band ("Caravan", "Perdido"), and Bob Brookmeyer made the valve trombone his solo voice through the 1950s and 60s. In Italian wind bands the valve trombone is standard. Everywhere else it is a curiosity.

Not the instrument?

Trombone squash (or tromboncino) is an Italian heirloom winter squash — a long, curved, pale-green gourd that gets its name from its slide-trombone shape.

Trombone shorts is the artist Troy Andrews, born 1986 in New Orleans — his story is in the pop-culture section above.

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