Reed & Brass is a working archive about woodwind instruments — how they are built, how they break, how they are repaired, and who played them. It collects bench notes, repair explanations and player portraits written over three decades in and around repair shops, band rooms and recording studios.
What you will find here
The archive is organised around six threads. Repair Bench covers the mechanical side: pads, tone holes, cracked clarinet bodies, overhauls and the small adjustments that decide whether a horn feels alive. Instruments looks at specific saxophones, clarinets and necks, and at design choices that change how a horn responds. Reeds & Materials deals with cane, brass, bronze and lacquer — the materials arguments that never end.
Players & Portraits remembers musicians who came through the shop, from section players to names most readers will know. Workshop Stories is the human part: the road, the customers, the jokes and the occasional disaster. Music & Education gathers the wider arguments about teaching, school programmes and the business around instruments.
How the pieces were written
These are practitioner notes rather than laboratory results. Where a piece describes a repair method, it describes what worked on a specific instrument in a specific condition; a different horn may need a different answer. Where a piece quotes prices, tariffs or dates, they belong to the moment the note was written and are kept as written rather than quietly updated.
About the author
The bench notes are published under the name Marlon Reeve, a pen name used for this archive. The material comes from a career spent designing, overhauling and playing woodwinds — clarinet first, saxophone soon after — including years of shop work, instrument design and time on the road.
Corrections
Instrument history is easy to get wrong, and repair advice is easy to over-generalise. If something here is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, the correction is welcome and will be made in the text rather than buried in a footnote.
Last modified: July 25, 2026