hi~ im currently learning piano and violin, however i want to drop piano somehow...and pick a new instrument instead. i have a few options....oboe, saxophone, trombone and horn. i know they are completely different instruments......but can you guys help me out? i heard that horn is a really difficult instrument, but actually im left-handed, is this an advantage in playing horn? personally i think violin is so hard for me, i wont pick any instrument that's harder than that.....and wut abt trombone? is it easy for beginners?

I took up the horn when I was 16 as a "new" instrument... being left-handed won't help you particularly, and it is extremely difficult and you'll have a lot of work to do before you can do anything with it - but it's worth it for the beautiful tone of the instrument... I don't regret taking it up for a second!!!

I play violin as well... but you can't really compare how difficult instruments are. I find the horn harder to play but that's mainly because I've only been playing it a year and a half... and the violin took me 5 years to get to grade 5 standard whereas the horn took me a year... so you really can't compare!! also you'll find horn easier than most beginners cos you can already read the treble clef and you're likely to have some relative pitch already. so.... i'd say go for the horn, but then im a bit biased!!!

Trombone... depends really on how long your arms are! (Mine were too short, so I took up the horn instead). trombones are fun, but i dont really know all that much about them. except that trombonists are in demand, so if you took it up you'd be invited to join about a million orchestras once you get to a reasonable standard.

Saxophone I've heard is fairly easy to pick up as a beginner (dodges hail of darts thrown by indignant saxophonists), but you're gonna have to work very hard at it if you want to play in groups, as it's extremely popular, and very difficult to get good at.
I dont know much about oboes either... but they sound good!!

sounds like horn is really worth playing...............but i do need much investment in order to enjoy the beautiful side of it....=P by the way, is horn only play notes in treble clef? and is trombone only on bass clef? i think i read treble clef better than bass so maybe its one of the factor of choosing an instrument...
i think my arms are quite long, so i may become a suitable trombone player!~

Horn players need both treble and bass clef, and have to interpret bass clef in two different ways: in modern music, the relationship between treble and bass clef is what one would expect, but in the early days of the horn, notes in bass clef were written an octave lower than you would expect. The most recent music in "old notation" that I know is the "Four last songs" of Richard Strauss, c.1947. These are also old-fashioned in being written for horns in other keys than F. Horn players need to know several transpositions.

Trombone players in brass bands sometimes play from transposing treble clef, so that they can also play euphonium or baritone parts, but in other ensembles they play from concert pitch parts. Before about 1840, when trombones of three different sizes, alto, tenor and bass, were the norm, the clef indicated which instrument the composer expected the player to use. During the later 19th C, composers, especially French ones, started using different combinations of trombones, so that by 1900 the norm in the UK was to find two tenors and a bass in most symphonic scores (though e.g. Debussy often wanted three tenors) and the clefs are no longer a reliable indication of which instrument is to be used. Coincident with the advent of the plug trombone, in the middle of the 20th C, bass clef became popular for all trombone parts among some composers: I don't know whether the different instrument influenced this or whether it was just a coincidence. Anomalies persisted, however. For instance, in his 10th symphony (1953), Shostakovich uses alto clef for his upper two trombones, but AFAIK he expected these parts to be played on tenors.

Horn: If you play Beethoven and similar classics, you'll soon learn to transpose at sight.