How to Clean a Trumpet

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Chris with Summerhays Music Center in Salt Lake City Utah. We're going to talk about how to clean your trumpet. There are a couple of different methods on how to clean it. You can take it into your local music shop and have the professionals do it, where they'll actually take it apart and chemically clean it for you. Or you can do it at home. You'll need the different types of brushes found in a cleaning kit. Brushes that will clean the mouthpiece, brushes that will clean inside the tubes, brushes that will clean the valve casings. You can clean it with mild, soapy, water, lukewarm. You do not want it to be boiling hot, or you can take off the lacquer that is on your trumpet. First thing we have to do is take the trumpet apart in order to clean it. So we're going to remove the slides, and the slides will come off really easy. And then the next part is the valves, these just rotate counter clockwise to take them off, and you will pull them out. You want to be very, very careful with the valves as to not chip them, hit them, break them. Then you will submerge all your parts in the soapy water, and proceed to clean them, like so. Giving them good brushes in and out, using all the brushes in all the tubes to get all the gunk out and cleaned. Same thing follow through each one of the parts, through each of the tubes. Once you have ran all your brushes with lukewarm soapy water, the next thing we want to do is rinse all of the parts really, really well. Then we're going to let it air dry until everything is completely dry. After that we can start putting it back together. And then we will start with the valves, each valve has a number on it. Number one, number one. We'll put the valves back in according to the numbers on the valves. At this time you can go ahead and put valve oil on each one, push the valve in, turn it until it locks. And then rotate clockwise until each of the caps are on. Then the next thing is we're going to put our slides back together, and you'll have some slide grease. You'll put a little bit of slide grease on each of the slides. Same thing, slide grease, slide grease, slide grease. And your trumpet is now clean and put back together and ready to go."