Congrats, newly minted trumpet player,
You chose trumpet. Now comes the daily opportunities to sound like a dying airhorn, subject your ego to cosmic inflation, and ruin everybody’s hearing. Time to join trumpet players worldwide on their quest to kidnap and brutally murder all melody parts.
Studies show that 32% of trumpet players are in jail for murder, 21% are homeless because their families abandoned them on a doorstep (and then went into the witness protection program, so they would never be found), and the other 47% would be better suited working for the military. One blast, and the enemies surrender! Welcome to the brotherhood.
Not only trumpet players are committed to destroying love of music. If awful teachers, boring music, and idiotic trombones can do it, so can you! As a trumpet player, it is your legacy to be worst but think you are best. With my new guidebook, The Trumpet’s Guide to Ego Inflation, you can be the best of the worst. Here’s a few simple steps to get you started:
The most important thing to remember is to maintain maximum ego size. Your ego should always be as large as the known universe and expanding just as quickly. You are best at everything. If anyone says otherwise, they deserve to be tortured to death. Break out the blasting, triple high G, flutter tongue, pitch bends. Just be careful not to deafen your victim until you are done with them. If they can’t hear you, all your efforts will be wasted.
You deserve all melody parts. You are best, no matter how bad you sound. Using your frightening smiting powers of Worst Trumpet in the Band, insure no one challenges your right to first trumpet parts. If the melody is in a different instrument, steal the music. If it’s in a different key, tear it up, flush it down the toilet, throw a tantrum, and place you bell over the melody instrument’s ears while practicing high notes. At least they won’t get the satisfaction of hearing themselves play.
Steal all solos! Any time there is a solo, it’s yours. Instead of letting the clarinet player who might actually do okay have it, take it for yourself. Send it through a paper shredder, soak it in the sewer, barf on it, steamroll it, and deliver it to your audience like a cat with a week-old rotting rat to it’s human.
Jazz solos are different, but it’s still generally the same concept. Despite the fact that you are the worst player in the jazz band, even worse than the alto saxes, you are entitled to all solos. Screw the chord changes and blues scale! Honk on whatever you want, as loudly as possible. Don’t bother making it sound good. After all, they're just guidelines, right? Right?...Right?
Be as loud and annoying as possible. Blast. You are the trumpets! forget that little under the staff. Why bother pleasing a couple little ps under your music when you could be drowning out the gong, bass drum, and everyone else?
When you have a flutter tongue, flutter tongue. Bring out your inner trumpet! Make everyone fall on the floor, writhing, and promising eternal servitude if you’ll “Please, make it stop, just make it stop!”
Anything anyone else can do, so can your trumpet. Percussion: just use your trumpet as a mallet. Trombone: So you don’t have a slide! Screw it! Of course you can do glissandos just as well! Flute: Ah, who cares? There just flutes. Smash ‘em!
Trumpet players are the supreme rulers of everything and anyone. Every time there is new music, trumpets get to pick parts first. Every time there is a party with donuts and oreos, trumpets are served first. The other instruments may not agree at first, but just whip out your trumpet for a little enforcing. You’ll have everyone pledging eternal servitude in no time.
Whenever you do not get your way, complain loudly. For example, if there are more than two measures of melody in another instrument, moan and groan about your boring part, which happens to have another 196 measures of sixteenth notes. If the low instruments or percussionists start to tell you you have no right to complain, or (Oh, the horrors!) try to show you their 198 measures of rests/whole notes, deafen them. Which brings me to the last tip:
When in doubt, blast. If someone questions you and you cannot think of a good comeback, or when someone challenges your right to the first trumpet part, or when someone tells you how lucky you are that you have notes faster than whole notes, or decides to expose the fact that you are not as good as you think you are, or any other such catastrophe, there is a simple solution. Deafen everyone. Voilà! Problem solved!

See new trumpet player? You too, in only a few short weeks, can be supreme ruler whatever is left of the band after you’re through with it! Order my book, The Trumpet’s Guide to Ego Inflation, today, and get started dominating the band and all the lowly non-trumpet players.