Trombone Champ gets truly nasty, adds the hellish Flight of the Bumblebee

Trombone player and a large bee
(Image credit: Holy Wow)

Trombone Champ, the fast-paced rhythm music game filled with nasty toots, just got even nastier by adding Flight of the Bumblebee to its roster of hits. That means as of today's update 2022's best comedy game is even funnier, because the famously difficult piece of music is absolute hell to play on a mouse-controlled trombone.

But don't take my word for it: pump up the volume in the gif below and take my toots for it:

Flight of the Bumblebee in Trombone Champ"

Yeah. Brutal. I'm sorry for doing that to you.

If you managed to make it more than halfway through my callous murder of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral interlude, you may notice that around the middle I click on something called Practice Mode. It's another new feature of today's update, which allows you to practice playing Trombone Champ's songs at slower speeds. You can turn it all the way down to 50%, which makes Flight of the Bumblebee much easier to play—though not any more pleasing to the ear.

Keep in mind that while playing in practice mode you'll earn fewer toots than when playing at full speed. Toots, if you haven't played Trombone Champ yet, are what you use to buy sacks of famous tromboner cards to spend on cosmetic items like new hats and horns. Toots are not to be confused with turds which is what you get when you destroy those cards, which can then be used to craft more cards. There are also demons, baboons, and hot dogs, by the way. There's kind of a lot going in Trombone Champ besides all the frantic, off-key tromboning.

There are also a few bug fixes in today's update, along with a redesigned character select screen, the ability to open multiple tromboner card packs quickly, and other improvements. Check out the full patch notes.

And if you'd like to hear what Flight of the Bumblebee is supposed to sound like, check out this video of Rousseau tackling it on piano. As someone in the comments says, "I can't even play the wrong notes that fast." 

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.