How to Clean Slides & Mouthpieces on Brass Instruments

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Dwayne Carter and on behalf of expertvillage.com, I have been talking about cleaning brass instruments. What I am going to do now is clean the slides of the trumpet. I am going to place them into some water to soak along with the mouthpiece and the valve caps. After they are soaked for a little while, I can use the mouthpiece brush to clean these. First I will start with the mouth piece, when insert it you make sure it is tightly in there so that you can see the tip of the brush coming from the other end and plunge it in and out to make sure it is adequately cleaned. Then we can go on to the valves. For each valve it is going to be the same process. I am going to start with tuning slide, each slide is going to be the same process. I am going to start with the tuning slide, you can plunge in and out making sure it is properly cleaned inside. With a tuning slide because it has a large crook here you can actually use a snake to go around and come all the way out the other side. The other slides, they are much smaller in diameter, so you just can use the mouthpiece brush on those and that is all it takes for us. For your valve caps you can get oil deposits at the bottom of this from your valve. So you just take your mouthpiece brush and run it around there to make sure that it is clean and that is the entire process."