The effect of instrument timbre (e.g., piano, trumpet, organ, and violin) on musical emotion recognition was tested in normal-hearing (NH) listeners and cochlear implant (CI) users. NH performance was best with the piano, and did not change when melodies were normalized with a fixed tempo. CI performance was significantly better with the piano and trumpet than with the violin and organ when both tempo and mode cues were preserved, but not for the tempo-normalized melodies. The sharper temporal onsets of piano and trumpet may enhance CI users’ perception of tempo cues important for musical emotion recognition.