Get Your Horns Cleaned

Get your horns cleaned

One of the most important practices brass musicians can take up is cleaning their horns. For more active players especially, this can have a major impact on the quality and efficiency of your playing as well as the longevity of your equipment. Over the course of my 4 years as an instrument technician I have cleaned thousands of instruments and dived deeply into the chemistry that drives it in order to understand how and why the best cleaning methods work.

Some necessary preliminary knowledge: What do I mean by cleaning and what is a more accurate term for “red rot?” When I say “clean” I DON’T mean soap in the bathtub. Dawn in particular is a great way to eliminate bacteria and grease from your horn, but there aren’t many cases where bacteria and grease are more than 20-30% of the problem. Soap in the bathtub is similar to the first step many technicians will take to severely degrease a horn, but the solution used by most technicians is 1 GALLON of soap to 4 GALLONS of water. Fare more extreme than any band director would suggest using at home. When I say clean, I mean chemically clean. As we play, residue of anything we’ve consumed that day lines the inner tubes of our instruments. Because our saliva and the food we consume are not chemically neutral, this results in chemical deposits--primarily calcium and lime--forming on the inside of our horns. It is impossible to remove these with just soap, water, and friction. A light phosphoric-based acid, however, will neutralize and remove them in 2-4 minutes. When you get your horn cleaned in a shop, they clean it so that it is chemically neutral.

As far as red rot, most folks only know about this chemical breakdown in its abstraction, but don’t really know what it is or what to look for, much less how to prevent it. A more accurate term is Dezincification. In this chemical change zinc alloys (like brass) lose zinc ions because something that the zinc can more readily/easily bond to has been introduced to the system--in our case, calcium and lime deposits encouraged by bacteria and left by food residue. Over time areas can lose all of their zinc leaving just thin bits of the other metal behind. Because copper is what’s left when brass dezincifies (see all those pink spots in the photo), and copper is a reddish metal, red rot is the term that we have come to use.

Preventing dezincification is the primary reason for cleaning your horns. Not only will a phosphoric-based acid neutralize those chemical deposits, but it will also fortify the bonds between the zinc and the copper that make up the brass of your instrument. Dezincified brass can develop holes and can even cause tubes to break. If tubes do rot they are replaceable and repairable, but it is quite expensive--many technicians charge a flat rate to custom make the patches as well as installation fees. I have seen 6/10 quality patchwork that starts at $45 per patch plus $60/hour of installation and refinishing time. Lead pipes (where red rot is most common) on high end horns sometimes start around $250 just to purchase let alone install. In other cases, you may find that some designer horns require you to ship them to manufacturers for high level maintenance and large scale tube replacement, and in all of those cases shipping and repair costs are immense. The best way to save money over the long game and make sure your horn lasts as long as you want it to is to get your horn cleaned and take a couple easy preventative measures.

These preventative measures include:

Regular cleaning. If you play your horn 2 hours a day or more, it should be cleaned at least twice a year. There’s some nuance here. If I’m a gigging trumpet player and most of my playing is freelance orchestral gigs but I use my B-flat and my flugelhorn for quintet playing, my C trumpet should get cleaned twice a year while I can probably get away with cleaning the B-flat and flugelhorn once a year.

Clean/neutralize your mouth before you play to eliminate bacteria and level the acidity of your saliva. The best way to do this is to brush your teeth before you play. If you have a particularly acidic microbiome (like me) a baking soda based toothpaste can help adequately neutralize your mouth. Arm and Hammer is a great brand, it’s inexpensive, and is available at almost any store where you can buy toothpaste.

Clean your mouthpieces once a week. Because our mouthpiece is so easily accessible and is our primary mode of contact into the inside of our horn, eliminating the bacteria there and neutralizing the mouthpiece is a great way to improve the cleanliness of your instrument. For mouthpiece cleaning I suggest a solution of dish soap and vinegar for silver or gold plated mouthpieces. You’ll want to make sure that there’s enough soap in your solution that the hue of the solution is only a touch lighter than the color of the soap you are using. For stainless steel mouthpieces, I suggest just soaking in isopropyl alcohol.

Avoid using lanolin-based greases. Lanolin is a waxy, yellow, highly alkaline substance excreted from sheep pores in order to make their wool water repellent. This was originally introduced as an instrument grease because it's natural, cheap, and so water resistant, but because lanolin is so intensely alkaline (promoting negative chemical charge), it encourages the separation of the brass alloy over time--leading to dezincification. It also stains slide tubes turning them a brownish color that requires an abrasive to remove. The tubes on our horns were meant to fit as originally constructed, and removing material may lead to your horn resonating differently. It isn’t 1950 anymore. Synthetic greases are now so much cheaper and cleaner than lanolin that the benefits don’t outway the costs anymore. The Superslick brand slide grease (the one you’ve probably seen at your local music store for like $2) is actually one of the best and cleanest slide greases on the market! Go for synthetic greases always.

These practices and regular chemical cleanings can add years to the life of your instrument and save you thousands of dollars in the long term!