Trumpet Trivia
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59 free Trumpet trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This trumpet trivia quiz covers the instrument itself and the players who made it famous. The easy questions are ones any band kid could answer: how many valves a trumpet has, what key the standard instrument is pitched in, how the sound is produced, the nicknames of Louis Armstrong, and the bugle call played at military funerals. The harder end is for brass players and jazz fans: which valve lowers the pitch a whole step, the keyed trumpet built for Haydn's concerto, why Dizzy Gillespie's bell pointed upward, the trumpets found in Tutankhamun's tomb and broadcast by the BBC in 1939, the Harmon mute Miles Davis pushed up to the microphone, the piccolo trumpet solo that Paul McCartney borrowed from a Bach concerto, and the record Herb Alpert holds on the Billboard chart. Cornets, flugelhorns, bugles, Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Wynton Marsalis, Doc Severinsen and Arturo Sandoval get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the instrument and each musician before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our jazz, musical instruments and Louis Armstrong quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which key is the most common trumpet pitched?
B♭
B♭ is a fairly recent standard: the first valved trumpets were usually pitched lower, in F, and the smaller B♭ model became near-universal only in the 20th century.
Q 02In the Book of Joshua, the walls of which city fell after priests blew trumpets for seven days?
Jericho
Jericho: seven priests carried rams'-horn trumpets around the city for six days, then circled it seven times on the seventh, when a long blast and a great shout brought the walls down.
Q 03Straightened out, about how long would the tubing of a standard trumpet be?
5 feet
About 5 feet: the tube runs roughly 148 cm, and trumpets have been folded into a compact loop since about 1500, after longer straight ones grew too unwieldy to handle.
Q 04What produces the sound of a trumpet?
Lips buzzing in a mouthpiece
Lips buzzing in a mouthpiece is what makes an instrument 'brass', not the metal: the saxophone is built of brass but, sounded with a reed, counts as a woodwind.
Q 05What is the musical term for the placement and shaping of a wind player's mouth on the instrument?
Embouchure
Embouchure comes from the French bouche, 'mouth'; by tightening or relaxing it, a trumpeter can sound several different notes without moving a finger.
Q 06What does pressing a valve do to the path the air takes through a trumpet?
Lengthens it
Lengthens it: each valve detours the air through an extra loop of tubing, and the longer path lowers the note by a semitone, a tone or a tone and a half, depending on the valve.
Q 07Verdi had straight fanfare trumpets specially built for the Triumphal March of which opera?
Aida
Aida: the opera's on-stage march gave the instrument its name, and straight fanfare trumpets of the kind are still called Aida trumpets.
Q 08Which type of valve is more common on trumpets in German-style orchestras?
Rotary
Rotary valves spin a rotor 90 degrees when a lever is pressed; trumpets built with them took hold in Germany and Austria, while the piston trumpet won out in France and elsewhere.
Q 09What do orchestral trumpeters learn to do at sight when parts are written for D or E♭ instruments?
Transpose
Transpose: rather than keep a trumpet for every key a composer names, players read the part as written and shift each note in their heads, playing it on their everyday instrument.
Q 10Which musicians usually play the bass trumpet?
Trombonists
Trombonists get the job because the bass trumpet's mouthpiece is close in size to their own; Wagner gave the instrument solo passages throughout his Ring cycle.
Q 11How does a cornet's bore differ from a trumpet's?
It is mostly conical
It is mostly conical, widening gently from mouthpiece to bell, and that taper gives the cornet a mellower tone than the trumpet, whose tube stays cylindrical until the bell flare.
Q 12The famous 'Trumpet Voluntary' was for many years wrongly credited to which English composer?
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell never wrote it: the tune is the Prince of Denmark's March by his younger and less famous contemporary Jeremiah Clarke.
Q 13The German word Flügel in flugelhorn means what?
Wing
Wing: one account says an 18th-century hunt leader, the Flügelmeister, used the horn to direct his wing of a ducal hunt; another holds that the instrument simply looked like one.
Q 21Which vocal trio had a 1941 hit about a trumpet player drafted to become a 'boogie-woogie bugle boy'?
The Andrews Sisters
The Andrews Sisters introduced the song in the Abbott and Costello army comedy Buck Privates, and their single climbed to number six on the charts.
Q 22Before valves existed, what kind of trumpet did court trumpeter Anton Weidinger devise to play every semitone?
Keyed
Keyed trumpets had side holes covered by padded keys, much like a woodwind; Haydn wrote his Trumpet Concerto for Weidinger's, but valves soon made the design obsolete.
Q 23Which composer, who lived in Mozart's house as a boy pupil, later wrote a trumpet concerto?
Hummel
Q 14Which free-jazz pioneer and Ornette Coleman sideman was renowned for playing the compact pocket trumpet?
Don Cherry
Don Cherry called his tiny horn a pocket trumpet, though collectors class his 1930s Besson as a pocket cornet; he played it on Ornette Coleman's pioneering free-jazz records.
Q 15What was a natural trumpet unable to do?
Play notes outside one overtone series
A natural trumpet could not play notes outside one overtone series because its tube had one fixed length; to change key, players fitted an extra coil of tubing called a crook.
Q 16Baroque trumpeters played melodies in which high register, where the instrument's natural notes lie close together?
Clarino
Clarino playing worked because the natural notes that high up sit close enough to form a scale; today's players usually take those Bach and Handel parts on a piccolo trumpet.
Q 17Which Beatles song has a piccolo trumpet solo?
Penny Lane
Penny Lane: McCartney saw David Mason play Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto on BBC television and had him in the studio six days later to add the solo.
Q 18What was the straight battlefield trumpet of the ancient Greeks called?
Salpinx
Salpinx: the narrow tube was usually bronze with a bone mouthpiece, and anatomists later borrowed the word for trumpet-shaped passages such as the Fallopian tube.
Q 19Which archaeologist's excavation uncovered a silver and a bronze trumpet in Tutankhamun's tomb?
Howard Carter
Howard Carter's team found both among the boy king's treasures; in 2011 the bronze one was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and resurfaced weeks later.
Q 20Legend holds that sounding Tutankhamun's ancient trumpets, as the BBC did in a famous broadcast, summons what?
War
War: a British bandsman played them on BBC radio in 1939, months before the Second World War, and a Cairo curator has claimed one was also blown before the first Gulf War.
Hummel went on to take over Haydn's old post with the Esterházy family, and he wrote the concerto for Anton Weidinger, the Viennese court trumpeter for whom Haydn had written his own.
Q 24Which bugle call signals lights out and is played at US military funerals?
Taps
Taps first stood in for the three rifle volleys at a soldier's burial in 1862, when an artillery captain feared that gunfire so close to the enemy would restart the fighting.
Q 25Which Johnny Cash hit got its trumpets after he said he dreamed of hearing the song with Mexican horns?
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire first came out as a folk song by another singer; after hearing that version, Cash dreamed up the horns and cut his own with trumpets in 1963.
Q 26Which style of Mexican ensemble plays its melodies on trumpets and violins over a bass guitarrón?
Mariachi
Mariachi groups began as string bands: trumpets joined only in the early 20th century and are now all but essential to the sound.
Q 27Which two nicknames did Louis Armstrong go by?
Satchmo and Pops
Satchmo and Pops: 'Satchmo' is a clipped 'Satchelmouth', one of several boyhood nicknames about the size of his mouth; in one telling, a British editor coined it by mistake with a greeting.
Q 28On which date did Louis Armstrong often claim to have been born?
July 4, 1900
July 4, 1900 was the birthday he gave all his life; in the 1980s an Armstrong expert found a New Orleans baptismal certificate dating his birth to August 4, 1901.
Q 29Louis Armstrong's 'Melancholy Blues' left Earth in 1977 on the golden record of which NASA probes?
Voyager
Voyager 1 and 2 each carry a copy: a committee chaired by Carl Sagan picked Armstrong's Hot Seven to speak for Earth alongside Bach and Chuck Berry.
Q 30For which song did Louis Armstrong win the 1965 Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance?
Hello, Dolly!
Hello, Dolly! went to number one in 1964, knocking the Beatles off the top of the US chart at the height of Beatlemania, when Armstrong was in his sixties.