Brad Close Brass Instrument Repair

Here's the finished alto sackbut.

The new shop is shaping up nicely.

Apologies if anyone has tried to call the shop in the last few days. It is taking awhile to transfer the phone number to my new location. You can still reach me by email as usual.

Another Drewelwecz tenor sackbut finished.

Making some sackbut crooks.

I recently finished building this contrabass sackbut in BBb. It is a copy of the one built by Georg Nicolaus Oller in 1639, which as far as I know is the only intact surviving contrabass sackbut. It sounds one octave below a tenor sackbut. The original has an extremely long slide with a long handle to reach the outer positions, and is somewhat unwieldy to play (to say the least). The request was made for this reproduction to have a double slide that's half the length of the original, to make it more playable, with side-by-side slide tubes. The slide crooks cross over each other at the end. I built this almost entirely out of red brass sheet with seamed tubes. The slide does utilize modern drawn tubing and chrome plating on the inner slide, though, for the sake of functionality.

This is a 2 valve tenor trombone I built for a customer. He requested independent valves with this specific type of compact wrap. The valves are in F and G and the pitch can also be changed by swapping the 2 valve slides.

I finished building this about a year ago. Eb Contrabass trombone with screw-on 10 1/2" bell flare. .578" bore double slide.

Correlation is not causation. How often we hear this; but do we really hear it? I saw a post today from a musician who had his instrument worked on and now believes it is ruined. He had a part replaced, and now it doesn't work properly. How can that be? It was a brand new part. He assumed the new part caused the problem, because he didn't have the problem with the old part. But I looked carefully at what he wrote, and he had ALSO had a different but related part worked on, and I'd be willing to bet that's the actual problem.

Here's an example: A customer came to me and said the valve would get stuck on his sousaphone every time he blew air through it. I was of course skeptical; the air pressure you create when you play an instrument is actually pretty low, not enough to make a valve stick in place. So I asked him to demonstrate, and sure enough, the valve got stuck. I then noticed that the brace holding the leadpipe had come unsoldered. When he went to blow into the instrument, he was of course pushing on the mouthpiece with his face, and that was pushing the leadpipe, and with no brace to hold it in place, was exerting force on the valve casing, distorting it enough to make the valve freeze. Re-soldering the brace fixed the problem.

Sometimes you might think you know what's wrong with your horn, but it might not always be what you think. If you take it in for repair, always explain the problem and let the tech recommend the solution.

Finished some more sackbuts.

Brad Close Brass Instrument Repair updated their address.

Here's a nice article about early brass replica builders that mentions Brad Close sackbuts.

https://www.earlymusicamerica.org/emag-feature-article/the-modern-world-of-early-brass/

The Modern World of Early Brass » Early Music America The people who build period instruments face many challenges.

Sometimes I get unusual requests from customers. This is a Renaissance style sackbut bell that fits a removable bell Bach Stradivarius trumpet. The idea was to have a soprano voice that can be combined with sackbuts in an ensemble.

Just shipped this Hainlein model F Bass sackbut!

Building an ancient Roman cornu replica (with valve section)