Improve your sight-reading! Trumpet Levels 1-5: Trumpet Book

Harris has designed this progression to feel organic rather than mechanical. Each level builds genuine fluency through targeted rhythmic and melodic work before students encounter graded sight-reading pieces, so confidence grows naturally alongside competence. The 2023 revision aligns with current ABRSM standards, and the online audio for 'going solo' pieces gives students a reliable performance reference without requiring you to play every single excerpt.

Purposeful and encouraging. The progression from isolated technical challenges to prepared pieces to untethered sight-reading creates real momentum. You feel yourself getting faster and more capable with each section, moving from understanding what a passage asks of you to actually executing it.

Trumpet students working through ABRSM Grades 1-5 who need systematic, confidence-building sight-reading practice. This book serves both one-on-one private students and ensemble musicians who want to read music fluently enough to pick up parts quickly without extensive preparation.

• Work through the rhythmic and melodic exercises before attempting the prepared pieces; these targeted drills address the specific technical issues your students will encounter in the sight-reading material.
• Use the online audio recordings of the 'going solo' pieces as a learning tool after students have read through them independently, not as a performance model to imitate.
• Rotate through the prepared pieces and sight-reading exercises in lesson rotation so students encounter fresh material regularly without pressure to perform every excerpt perfectly.
• Pause between the melodic exercise and the prepared piece to ask students what technical challenges they notice, building metacognitive awareness of their own sight-reading patterns.

This is ideal for structured individual practice between lessons or as a supplementary resource in ensemble rehearsals when students need to strengthen their ability to tackle new repertoire quickly. The graded difficulty makes it useful across multiple trumpet players in a band or orchestra, regardless of where each student sits in the ABRSM scale.

• Sight-reading fluency across Grades 1-5
• Recognizing and executing specific rhythmic figures (simple to complex)
• Reading and playing melodic patterns with accuracy and appropriate phrasing
• Building confidence tackling unfamiliar pieces independently
• Connecting technical understanding to actual performance in real time