Trombone sheet music

Bass clef or treble clef — check before you buy

In orchestral, wind band and most solo repertoire the trombone reads bass clef at concert pitch: what is written is what sounds. Higher passages switch to tenor clef to avoid ledger lines, and a player who has never met it finds the first encounter genuinely disorienting.

British-style brass band music writes tenor trombone in treble clef as a B♭ transposing instrument, so a written C sounds B♭ a ninth below. Bass trombone stays in bass clef even in brass band. This is not an obscure edge case: a large share of the trombone catalogue is brass band music, and a player who reads only bass clef cannot use it.

If a listing says "brass band", "cornet band" or gives parts as "1st/2nd/Solo", assume treble clef transposed. If it says "orchestra", "concert band", "wind band" or "trombone and piano", assume bass clef at pitch.

F attachment, alto and bass trombone

Music written below the low E of a plain tenor trombone requires either an F attachment (a valve opening extra tubing) or a bass trombone. Editions rarely warn you. If you play a straight tenor, check the lowest note before buying anything described as "bass trombone" or written in a symphonic context.

The alto trombone appears in Classical and early Romantic orchestral parts and in a small solo repertoire, usually notated in alto clef. Buying an alto part for a tenor instrument means transposing at sight.

Free trombone repertoire

The nineteenth-century solo repertoire — Guilmant, David, Rimsky-Korsakov — is out of copyright, as are the standard study books by Arban, Rochut (after Bordogni) and Blume. Orchestral parts for anything before about 1930 are also free. What is not free is a modern edition with edited breath marks and a clean piano reduction, which for the concerti is worth paying for.