Mark VI Overhaul by Top UK Tech Bryce Ferguson

Bryce Ferguson cradling my freshly
overhauled Mark VI tenor

Just returned to Lagos after two and a half weeks in the UK, primarily up in Scotland where I was attending a professional training course at the University of Glasgow. Believe or not, the weather was spectacular; I heard it was the best weather recorded in Scotland for 200 years!

My Mark VI tenor has had its Eb spring broken off in the post for about nine months now and I've been playing that primo horn with a rubber band wrapped around the key ever since. Nobody in Nigeria could fix it as the spring stub had seized up in the post; attempts to repair it there damaged the horn worse. Once I knew I would be travelling to Glasgow I started looking for a tech who could repair it properly. I had an email exchange with Alastair Haydock, who owns Glasgow’s leading music shop, and Alastair was forthcoming enough to refer me to Bryce Ferguson in neighboring Edinburgh, saying he knew what my horn was worth and Bryce was the best sax tech in Scotland, better than his own repairmen. Edinburgh is about an hour by train from Glasgow so I schlepped my horn to Scotland from Lagos on the plane and then took the train over to Edinburgh after class one night to drop it off with Bryce’s apprentice.

Talk about the importance of trust in business: I had never met Bryce before and here I was leaving an instrument worth as much as a small car with him, based on a couple of Skype conversations where it was obvious that he loved horns and knew exactly what to do. Bryce phoned me in the morning with the bad news – the horn needed a complete overhaul in his opinion, not just a new spring and a few adjustments. Cost would be about as much as the last horn I bought. Oh well – it would be like arguing with a brain surgeon. I asked him to go ahead and do the overhaul. It would mean not having my horn with me for the remaining days I was in Scotland, and any chance of sitting in at a local venue went out the window.

Bryce with project horns, Selmer and Borgani

Got the horn back on Saturday. Bryce had disassembled it, fixed the bad spring and re-soldered the post, cut off the keys on two stacks and straightened the rods as much as possible (he said nothing on a Selmer is straight to begin with), laser levelled the tone holes, and did an ultrasonic clean of the entire horn. This horn sounds righteous so it has been played intensely throughout its life, but previous owners were perhaps not so careful with repairs and maintenance. Springs were mostly OK but corks and felts had to be replaced and the finishing touch was installation of a set of Prestini pads, which Bryce said are the best and should last ten years. Play testing, adjustment, settling in overnight, testing again, and final tweaks. The horn is now set up like a “modern” horn. It always played easily but now its quirks are gone, lazy keys and such. Funny, because it always played great to me and I never would have suspected that so much work needed to be done. My friend Dotun Bankole from Femi Kuti’s band always preferred playing my Mark VI to his, and that was before the overhaul. It now blows effortlessly from top to bottom.

Now I have to make up for about three weeks without practice. It will be back to running laps and doing push-ups for a while.

Here’s the link to Bryce’s shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, brassandwoodwind.co.uk.