Simple Songs For Brass

August 10th, 2014
music, trumpet
I'm trying to find songs that would work well for an unusual casual brass ensemble:
  • One person who actually learned to play trumpet, but hasn't played much in a while. They can read well, but their easy range is now just Eb4 to Db5 (F4 to D5 thinking in Bb) and they can't play too fast. A few notes below that Eb4 are probably fine, but not too many.
  • Two or three people on baritones (octave below trumpet) and maybe Eb tuba (octave and a half below trumpet) who don't read music and just want to fool around.
This means we need sheet music, to be read with C as Bb, but also songs that are well known enough that others can just play along. The only sheet music we had on paper was Bach duets, which failed this second category, so we spent most of our time looking online for sheet music, which was less fun than playing. We did fine a few that worked, though:

When the Saints Go Marching In
Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye

(Several other things didn't end up working well, mostly because we found bad sheet music or they were the wrong range.)

Looking now, a few other things that I think would work would be:

Oh Susanna
You Are My Sunshine
Yankee Doodle

What else would be good?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)