Tristar Piccolo Bb

The instrument arrived and obviously I was very excited. On opening the case I found quite a good looking instrument. I had issues with the valves and gave the instrument a thorough clean. The instrument was quite filthy. Some of the valves still had metal off cuts still in them. They have used cheap rubber off cuts for the spit valves. Replacing all the parts was a nightmare. The valve caps and bases struggled to fit back onto the valves. It took several hours and much more cleaning to actually get the valves to move up and down. The case is of extremely poor quality. On pulling the mouthpiece out the entire casing came with it including some foam. If a little more time was allowed during manufacturing and packaging much of these issues would be remedied.

The sound of the instrument was quite surprising. It sounds great playing within the C scale and I found it easier to produce notes on this instrument than another piccolo trumpet I have of much better brand and quality.

Problems arose once I went higher than C. "D" pitches more like a semitone than a tone above C and much use of alternate fingering is required for D, E and E flat. The 4th valve tuning slide needed to come out a significant amount but once done tuning of this valve was adequate.

I may have gotten a lemon but be be careful buying this instrument. It's cheap for a very good reason.

(My normal instrument is a Schilke E flat soprano cornet)

Tristar Piccolo Bb,It sounds pretty good as long as you give it a chance. a decent horn....takes a while to get used to but i like it just fine now.....just be sure to try and take care of key problems and you might want another mouth piece (7C preferably) and the screw to the lead pipe really digs into your skin between your thumb and pointer finger.....so just wear gloves of a band-aid...something like that fixes the problem right up..good for slow stuff......but it can be used for faster stuff...just sounds a little......weird. but over all.....i like this horn