Overview of Cleaning Brass Instruments

Series Summary

A clean instrument is a happy instrument that will be faithful to every note the player attempts to produce. There is enough pressure playing in a band without having to worry about whether your trumpet or French horn will perform up to standards. Could you live with yourself if you got demoted from first chair because your A flat sounded like the big blob of spit clogging up your valves? Of course not, so get cleaning…

In this series of free brass instrument care videos from our music professional, you will learn how to take apart your horn, soak it, clean it and put it back together again. Our expert shows you how to remove the slides and valves, oil or grease them and then put them back in place. Follow these easy steps and your brass instrument will sound as good as new!

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm JD and I am here to talk to you about maintaining your instruments and cleaning them. Why should we clean our instruments? Well I guess its since their air phones, that meaning air travels through them, we don't want to impede the air or give it a hard time as it's going and occasionally as we blow whatever is in our mouth into these things: moisture, condensation, bits of food occasionally, and other non such gets lodged in the instrument. So what you have to do is disassemble the instrument, inspect it, clean the parts if needed, oil them and grease them, the valves the slides. And so today I am going to demonstrate on this baritone how to pull it apart, how to give it a bath, and how to clean it up. I will also be showing you how to do it to another valves instrument, the trumpet. So let's start by inspecting and disassembling our baritone. "