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Saxophones
Serviced, repadded, repairedSoprano to baritoneService from €1405 to 8 working days
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Clarinets
Serviced, repadded, repairedWood or plastic, any ageService €955 to 8 working days
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Flutes
Serviced, repadded, repairedClosed or open holeService €1105 to 8 working days
Free fifteen-minute look while you wait, Tuesday to Saturday.
§ 1
How a Job Goes
Bring it in, in its case if it has one, on any day the bench is open. If it is your first time, write to hello@altovance.com and directions come back with the reply. It can be a conservatory alto, a harmonie clarinet with forty years of Sunday mornings in it, or something a parent found in the attic last weekend. Lieve takes it out on the bench while you wait and gives it fifteen minutes: pads, springs, corks, joints, a few notes played from the bottom up. The look is free and the verdict is honest. If it needs one pad, that is what you hear. If it needs a full repad, you hear that too, and why.
Anything over €60 is written down before a screwdriver touches it: the job, the price, the day it will be ready. Nothing is done that was not agreed on that slip. If something worse turns up once the keys are off, the work stops and you are asked.
Then the work. A service takes five to eight working days and a full repad three to four weeks. Small fixes that arrive before 11:00 on a Saturday often go home the same morning. With a concert that evening and the instrument on the bench before 11:00, a same-day fix is €40 on top of the job.
Collection is the step that matters. Every instrument is play-tested by Lieve before it goes back, and then it is handed to you at the bench to play yourself before you pay, in cash or by card.
§ 2
What Comes Through the Door
September is clarinets, by the dozen, from pupils starting at the academy and from cupboards where they sat since June, most with cork grease on every key and last term's reed still clamped to the mouthpiece.
Winter is pads. From November the damp gets into felt, and the same clarinets that left in September come back in January with low notes that bubble.
Spring is the contests. From March to May every harmonie and fanfare in East Flanders rehearses for a jury, the saxophone sections find every leak they ignored all winter, and the bench runs about a week behind.
Summer is quiet: a few flutes after the conservatory exams, a wedding-band tenor that has to sound right by Saturday, and then the shutters go down.
Classified
Notice · Summer Closure
The Bench Is Shut From 20 July to 9 August
Altovance closes every summer. Lieve is back at the bench on Monday 10 August to answer messages, and the door opens again on Tuesday 11 August at 09:30. A full repad takes three to four weeks, so one that has to be finished before the shutters go down should be on the bench by mid-June.