Concert Pitch Trumpet Fingerings

March 30th, 2012
music, trumpet
What everyone else calls a 'Bb', brass players call a 'C'. While you can argue for this, it's confusing and annoying. I want to use the standard names for the notes from the beginning. I took the fingerings from this chart and converted them to concert pitch:

note 1st octave 2nd octave 3rd octave
E 1-2-3 2 2
F 1-3 0 0
F# 2-3 2-3 2-3
G 1-2 1-2 1-2
G# 1 1 1
A 2 2 2
Bb 0 0 0
B 1-2-3 1-2
C 1-3 1
C# 2-3 2
D 1-2 0
Eb 1 1

Now I can figure out the standard keys:

G/Em/Am/Dmix
note 1st octave 2nd octave 3rd octave
G 1-2 1-2 1-2
A 2 2 2
B 1-2-3 1-2
C 1-3 1
D 1-2 0
E 2 2
F# 2-3 2-3

D/Bm/Em/Amix
note 1st octave 2nd octave 3rd octave
D 1-2 0
E 2 2
F# 2-3 2-3
G 1-2 1-2 1-2
A 2 2 2
B 1-2-3 1-2
C# 2-3 2

A/F#m/Bm/Emix
note 1st octave 2nd octave 3rd octave
A 2 2 2
B 1-2-3 1-2
C# 2-3 2
D 1-2 0
E 2 2
F# 2-3 2-3
G# 1 1

Update 2014-01-18: I've now been playing trumpet for a year and a half, and thinking of the notes in concert pitch has worked out well for me. While the fingerings were initially strange they were going to be strange playing contra dance music regardless, and the hard part is the lips anyway. Sometimes before I start an activity I have weird ideas about how the people already doing that activity should be doing something differently, and often I'm wrong, but this is a case where looking back doing it the standard way would have been much harder.

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