During the 20th century some soprano trombones—dubbed slide cornets—were made as novelties or for use by jazz trumpet players including Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.

German musicologist Adolf Bernhard Marx (1847) and English music scholar Ebenezer Prout (1897) only mention the soprano to state that it is considered obsolete, and French organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor in his 1904 treatise only mentioned that some manufacturers were still making them, while describing the alto as obsolete.

[10] These were used by a few jazz trumpet players like Louis Armstrong, Bobby Hackett and Dizzy Gillespie, but otherwise were not widely adopted.

[10] In the early 2010s, trumpeter Torbjörn Hultmark of the Royal College of Music commissioned a soprano trombone with an F valve, built by German maker Thein Brass.

[13] The sopranino trombone in E♭, a fourth higher than the soprano and an octave above the alto, exists only in small numbers custom made for Moravian churches in the United States.

[15] Thein also make a novelty piccolino trombone in F, a fifth higher than the B♭ piccolo, originally made for the German Brass ensemble.

The player must combine both trumpet playing and trombone slide techniques to control intonation and note selection accuracy.

[17] Hultmark has also worked with the British Music Teachers Board to produce a syllabus of grade examinations for the soprano trombone.

[18] Other researchers have reported the soprano trombone can also be used as a pedagogical tool to help trumpet players improve several core aspects of their playing technique.

British composer Brian Ferneyhough called for two in his large 2006 work Plötzlichkeit; after playing one of the parts in a performance, Hultmark became a proponent of the soprano trombone as a serious instrument.