My son loves the look and style of the horn and isn't worried about being different. So it appears to be a 1923, possibly up to 1930 based on my research. The horn is a reasonably well maintained (few small dings in bell) Holton Revelation sn#79,xxx. Wow, thanks for all the thoughtful comments! Maybe you can give some more information. I don't know how good the Holton you are looking at is some would be excellent and some not. The professional instruments are good, but use a special inner slide with faces rather than being round and repairs may be difficult. My first horn with an F-attachment was an Olds Ambassador. Olds instruments were extremely well made and any model would be a good purchase.

There are some Getzen instruments (Super Deluxe in particular) that were used as starter horns (I used one in elementary school in the 1950s) Some were intended to be used by beginners: Holton Collegiate, Pan American (Conn student model), Gladiator (King student model). There are a lot of really good instruments to look for. Especially ones from the 1930s and 1940s. Those two caveats aside, older instruments can be very good starters. This can be fixed, but it's another expense. Low Pitch was at A=435 and even with the uning slide all the way in it's a little low. High pitch means the instrument is almost in B rather than Bb and the tuning slide is WAY too short to compensate. There were two standards: High Pitch and Low Pitch. Some vintage horns can be in really bad shape and may be very hard to fix.Īlso note that tuning standards were a little different 100 years ago.

Model holton collegiate