The Bench

Every note on a woodwind depends on a hole that is either open or shut, and a pad is the thing that shuts it. When it shuts properly the air in the tube stops at the right place and the note speaks. When it does not, even by the width of a hair at the back of the cup, the tube leaks and the instrument starts to argue. Low notes crack or refuse. The player blows harder, bites, buys stronger reeds and decides the problem is them.

It almost never is. Pads age. Leather dries and goes hard, felt packs down, skin splits at the edge where the tone hole presses into it, and a knock in a gig bag bends a key a fraction so the cup lands at a slant. None of it happens in a day, which is why a player who has lived with a slow leak for a year is often the most surprised person in the room when it is closed.

Saxophone pads are leather stretched over felt on a card back, and the larger ones carry a resonator in the centre, a small domed disc fixed through the leather. Resonators reflect sound back into the tube and brighten it, and changing their kind changes the voice of a horn, so Lieve matches what the instrument came in with unless the owner asks otherwise. The biggest pads on a baritone are the size of a beer mat.

Clarinet pads are small and fussy: felt wrapped in thin skin for most keys, sometimes leather on the bigger keys of the lower joint. They sit in shallow cups over tone holes cut into wood or plastic, and a chipped tone-hole edge will never seal, however good the pad.

Flute pads are the most delicate of the three: thin skin over felt, held in the cup by a screw and a washer rather than set in anything. They are levelled with paper shims thinner than newsprint, one under this side, two under that, until the pad meets its tone hole evenly all the way round. A single stubborn flute pad can take a whole afternoon.

Before a new pad goes in, the cup has to be level and the tone hole flat, or the best pad in the drawer will leak. The old pad comes out with a little heat, the cup is cleaned back to bright metal, and the new one is floated in on a bed of natural shellac warmed over a small flame. The key is closed with light pressure and held while the shellac cools, so the pad takes an impression of the tone hole: a shallow, even ring.

Then it is warmed again, nudged, closed and checked, as many times as it takes for that ring to run the full circle at one depth. Shellac is used because it can be reheated and reset years from now by whoever opens the horn next. A pad set in glue is set once. Flutes take no shellac at all, only shims, which is part of why they take so long.

Looking is not enough. Every finished instrument goes into the dark corner of the workshop with a leak light, a thin lamp on a flexible lead that slides down the bore. With the room lights off, each key is closed in turn. A good pad shows nothing. A leaking pad shows a thread of light at the rim, sometimes no wider than a hair, and that one goes straight back on the bench.

After the light comes paper: a narrow strip drawn out from under the closed pad at several points round the rim. The drag should feel the same everywhere. Only then is the instrument played, slowly, from the bottom note up, by somebody listening for the leak rather than for the music, and then by the owner at the bench on collection, the last step of every job.

Ghent is built on water, and from November to March the damp gets into everything, felt included. Felt takes up moisture and swells; skin goes slack, then tight again when the heating comes on. A clarinet seated perfectly in August can start to bubble on its low notes by January without anyone having touched it. That is not a bad repad. It is a Ghent winter.

What helps: swab after every rehearsal, leave the case open for an hour at home before shutting it, and keep the instrument away from the radiator and the car boot. A pad left wet and closed overnight can stick by morning and tear when it is opened.

A newly seated pad is not finished when it seals. Shellac keeps settling as it cools, and leather and skin relax for a day or two after they are pressed. So every pad is clamped closed overnight, checked again in the morning and reset if it has moved. On a full repad that cycle runs across every key, more than once, and working later does not make it go faster.

That is why a full repad takes three to four weeks and is never done in under a week, whatever the concert. A pad seated in a hurry leaks in a month, and then the owner has paid twice and played badly in between. If a performance comes first, the honest answer is a service now to get through it and the repad afterwards. Both are priced in the ledger.