The trumpet fingering chart — but live

Pick a written note to see the three-valve fingering. Then toggle the horn — the fingering does not change, but the actual sounding pitch does. That is the whole reason orchestral trumpeters carry several instruments to a gig.

The standard. Used in jazz, pop, marching bands and most band parts.

Chart based on Arban's Complete Conservatory Method for the Trumpet (1864), still the standard reference. Synthesised tone is an approximation — a real trumpet has bend and attack no oscillator captures.

Why a working trumpet player owns several

The audience hears a trumpet. The player hears a problem. The Bb trumpet is the default — the cheap school instrument, the marching-band horn, the one that comes to mind when someone says "trumpet." But its bright, slightly raucous voice is wrong for a lot of music, and its transposition is awkward for a player reading along with strings.

In a US symphony orchestra, the standard instrument is the C trumpet — slightly shorter, slightly brighter, and tuned in concert pitch so the player reads the same notes the violinists do. For Bach, Handel and high Baroque solo parts, the player switches to a piccolo trumpet, which puts the impossibly high "clarino" register inside a normal hand. For a featured solo with a brass band, a flugelhorn rounds the tone down to something the listener can sit close to. A first-call orchestral trumpeter routinely owns Bb, C, D/Eb, and piccolo trumpets, plus a cornet for the lighter band repertoire — five separate instruments before you count rotary-valve trumpets for German repertoire.

The widget above is the consequence of that. The valve combinations stay the same on every one of these horns. What changes is the sounding pitch. A trumpeter switching instruments mid-concert is, in effect, reading three different transpositions while their fingers do the same thing.

The 9 trumpet types in working use

Ranked from highest to lowest. Tubing length matters more than overall size — that is what sets the pitch.

The trumpet before 1814 could barely play a scale

For centuries, the trumpet was a natural trumpet — a fixed length of tubing with no valves. It could only sound the notes in its harmonic series. In the low register that gave you about three usable notes. To play a melody, you had to go up to the top of the instrument, into the "clarino" range, where the harmonics sit close enough together to form a scale. Bach wrote there. Almost no living player can sustain it.

In 1814 in Prussia, Heinrich Stölzel and Friedrich Blühmel patented a working valve mechanism. Pressing a valve diverts the air through a short loop of extra tubing, lowering the pitch by a fixed interval. Three valves in combination cover every chromatic step inside an octave. Within a generation the natural trumpet was obsolete, and within another the instrument settled on the Bb-trumpet form it still has.

The bent trumpet was an accident

Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet, with the bell crooked upward at 45 degrees, was not a design choice. On 6 January 1953, at his 36th birthday party at Snookie's Sugar Bowl in New York, two members of the dance duo Stump and Stumpy fell on his trumpet, which had been left on a stand. The bell bent permanently upward.

Gillespie played it that night and discovered he liked it — the upward bell threw the sound back at him and let him hear his own playing more clearly. He had Martin Band Instruments build him a custom version with the bell angled deliberately. Every Dizzy Gillespie trumpet from 1954 onward was bent.

The six players who shaped the instrument

Tap a card to read more. Every one of them owned several trumpets and chose between them by the bar.

Trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn — three voices, three bores

All three are pitched in Bb. All three use identical fingerings. They sound completely different from each other.

The difference is the bore — the cross-sectional profile of the tubing. The trumpet has a primarily cylindrical bore: most of the tubing is the same diameter from end to end, with a flare only near the bell. That cylindrical section is what produces the trumpet's bright, projecting, slightly aggressive tone. The cornet's bore is more conical, widening continuously through the instrument. That gives it a warmer, more rounded sound — a less penetrating presence in an ensemble. Louis Armstrong played the cornet through his New Orleans years and only switched to trumpet around 1925.

The flugelhorn takes the conical idea even further. Its bore widens steeply and its bell is deep and broad, which produces a soft, mellow voice that has become a kind of secondary jazz solo instrument. Miles Davis used a flugelhorn for most of the 1960 album Sketches of Spain. Chuck Mangione's 1977 single "Feels So Good" — flugelhorn from end to end — sold over two million copies in the US.

Not the instrument?

Trumpet vine (or trumpet creeper) is the climbing plant Campsis radicans, native to the south-eastern United States and named for its trumpet-shaped orange flowers.

Trumpet-bearing angels are biblical imagery — the archangel Gabriel, and the seven trumpets of Revelation chapters 8 to 11. The brass instrument took its name from those earlier ceremonial trumpets, which were tubes of bronze or silver with a clear ceremonial role centuries before the valved instrument existed.

Continue exploring