Number of trombonists in the world?

[Tetraphosphate]

I've been wondering, as the title says, how many trombonists there are in the world? Of course it'll be impossible to know the exact amount, but it would be fun to speculate

Also I'm guessing the number of tromboners would be fewer than pianists, violins, flutes, etc.

[JohnL]

Actively playing or people who played the instrument at one time?

I expect there are more people overall actively playing trombone than violin (amateur, pro, and students). More school bands than orchestras, more amateur bands than amateur orchestras. More flutes than trombones. Probably more pianists, too, but that would be counting “occasional” players (lots of people own keyboards and play “once in a while”).

[Neo Bri]

Yeah, you have to define players.

[BGuttman]

Two -- many

[Tetraphosphate]

Yeah, you have to define players.

Hmmm.
I was thinking maybe people who play regularly (more than once a week)?

[Tetraphosphate]

I expect there are more people overall actively playing trombone than violin (amateur, pro, and students). More school bands than orchestras, more amateur bands than amateur orchestras.

Yeah, but a lot of people in Asia learn violin too, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they tend to do more solo pieces? so not necessarily in orchestras. (just making a guess, tbh)

[Kbiggs]

If I’m on a gig and a trombonist doesn’t show, there’s one fewer.
If someone else gets the gig, there’s too many.

[Mikebmiller]

This is sort of like that formula for guessing how many extra terrestrial civilizations might be out there. Let's do some basic math:

According to this site: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list ... facts.html

There are approximately 37,000 high schools in the USA between public and private.

How many have bands?

According to this: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/ ... sing-grade 98% of schools with over 500 students offer some type of music. So let's say that 2/3 of all high schools have some sort of band. So that would be somewhere around 20-25,000 HS bands in the USA, ranging from very small to over 200 members.

How many trombone players in each band? Usually 3-10 depending on the size of the band. So if we have 25K bands with an average of 6 trombone players each, that is around 150,000 high school trombone players scattered across the USA. If a high school has 4 classes, 9th-12th grade, that is approximately 37,500 people per school class that start trombone. If you spread that out over the average life span in the USA of 78 years and subtract the 12-14 years that people live before they start playing, that gives approximately 2.4 million people in the USA who have played trombone at some point in their life.

How many of these people continue playing after high school? Based on what I have seen in my area, way less than 10% of high school musicians continue playing after school. Maybe closer to 5% or less. So an educated guess would be that there are somewhere between 120,000 and 240,000 people that have played trombone past high school. But just based on my experience in my community, even that number would be way high. In a county of 200,000 people, I only know about 10-15 adults who actually play trombone on any kind of regular basis.

So, basically, I have no idea. But it was fun to crunch the numbers.

[Burgerbob]

7.

[StevenC]

Yes, it is impossible to do an exact count, so we will need to use sampling. In my household, two out of three members play trombone. I think extending this to other households may yield an over-count. In my sister's household, there is only one trombone player among five members. Is that more typical?

[Posaunus]

In my sister's household, there is only one trombone player among five members. Is that more typical?

Yeah Steven, that sounds about right - 20% tromboning frequency. So extrapolating to the U.S. population of 325 million, there must be about 65 million trombonists within the U.S borders!

Ain't statistics wonderful?

[harrisonreed]

Actively playing or people who played the instrument at one time?

I expect there are more people overall actively playing trombone than violin (amateur, pro, and students). More school bands than orchestras, more amateur bands than amateur orchestras. More flutes than trombones. Probably more pianists, too, but that would be counting “occasional” players (lots of people own keyboards and play “once in a while”).

I don't think there are more people playing trombone than violin, mostly because of youth and community orchestras, but also Asia.

[Mikebmiller]

I think a better question would be "how many people in the USA actually make a full time living playing and/or teaching trombone. I would guess that that number would be somewhere under 1,000.

[StevenC]

I think a better question would be "how many people in the USA actually make a full time living playing and/or teaching trombone. I would guess that that number would be somewhere under 1,000.

In our local school district, both the high school and middle school band directors are trombone players. Do they count?

[BGuttman]

7.

Does that include you?

Then again, if we were to limit ourselves to only trombone players who do nothing OTHER than play trombone, that number could be pretty accurate.

[Burgerbob]

7.

Does that include you?

Then again, if we were to limit ourselves to only trombone players who do nothing OTHER than play trombone, that number could be pretty accurate.

Oops! You're right.

6.

[Tetraphosphate]

In my country, there aren't actually a lot of trombonists. (well, New Zealand is a smallish country so that sorta makes sense). I'm the only trombonist at my school, so

[JohnL]

In our local school district, both the high school and middle school band directors are trombone players. Do they count?

As trombone players, certainly (as long as they play regularly). They wouldn't count as someone who makes a living player/teacher trombone.

[Mikebmiller]

In our local school district, both the high school and middle school band directors are trombone players. Do they count?

As trombone players, certainly (as long as they play regularly). They wouldn't count as someone who makes a living player/teacher trombone.

Actually, many of the band directors I know that started life as trombone players rarely play much any more. These folks have music degrees, but I can play circles around some of them. So the rub is that you go into music as a profession because you are talented at an instrument, but you end up spending your days running marching band practice for 3 hours and never have time to actually play that instrument.

[Mhoutris]

Ah yeah, you should ask the manufactures. I mean, I've toured the Conn-Selmer/Bach/King etc. plant in Cleveland 3 times now and they're making TONS of instruments every day. There's obviously a huge market for new instruments when you consider how cheap you can get used horns on Craigslist or Facebook.

[Tetraphosphate]

It's actually the opposite where I live... there are only 2-3 trombones at my local music shop, and KBB Music only has 2 bass trombones for sale in the whole of New Zealand