Industry Voices: Martin Ludlow, Director at Double Reed Ltd


In our latest edition of Industry Voices, we talk with Director of Double Reed Ltd, Martin Ludlow. This weekend marks “International Repair Day”, and Martin was kind enough to explain Double Reed’s care and approach towards the repair of niche instruments.

Double Reed Ltd is well known for its high-quality restoration of second-hand bassoons. Could you share how this journey started, and what inspired you to focus on bassoon repair and restoration?

We have been dealers in second hand bassoons since our foundation in 2010. Repairing bassoons arose naturally from selling second hand bassoons, as inevitably everything we sell needs servicing as a minimum. We started by contracting out the repair side of the business in the early 2010s while we built up enough knowledge and expertise before bringing it in-house.

Customers come from all over the UK and even internationally for your services. What do you think sets Double Reed apart from other repair services, attracting such a diverse clientele?

First, bassoons are exceedingly complex instruments and nothing helps to hone skills as much as being confronted by fresh problems on a daily basis. Working day in day out on bassoon repairs, over time our repairers become familiar with everything that can go wrong with a bassoon and how to fix it. And having colleagues also working just on bassoons means problems can be shared and collaborated on, advancing knowledge and understanding. Over time we have therefore built up a possibly unrivalled pool of expertise we can draw upon for our customers.

Second, we employ as many professional-standard bassoonists as repairers as we can, so they understand the fine nuances of performance and therefore know when a bassoon still isn’t performing quite as it should. It also means that our repairers are all as obsessed with bassoons and making them play as well as possible as we are!

Third, being absolute sticklers for quality. All bassoons which come in to us are play-tested multiple times to ensure they are perfect. Our standard is whether we would want to play on that bassoon ourselves. If not, we get to work again.

Over time our reputation has steadily spread and we now have customers coming to us from all over Europe and as far afield as, for example, the Middle East, Singapore and Australia.

Bassoon repair requires specialised skills, and at Double Reed, you train your staff from scratch. Can you elaborate on the challenges of training repair staff in such a niche field?

Training staff from scratch is a big burden for a small company, and we would love to be able to recruit already-trained bassoon repairers but sadly that has not proved possible.

It takes several months before a new trainee starts becoming properly productive. And, given the amount of time our established repairers have to take out of their repair schedule to train and oversee new trainees, it is probably a year before we start to break even on a new recruit. Clearly, this isn’t something we can afford to get wrong, so getting it right at the recruitment stage is very important.

On the other hand, given that quite a few specialist bassoon repairers elsewhere in the UK are either approaching retirement age or are past it, we see it as part of our civic duty to the bassoon community to train repairers until and unless alternative means of training comes along.

Given the complexities of bassoon repairs, how do you ensure your team maintains the high standards your customers expect, especially when training new staff members?

I think I have more or less answered this question previously. I would add that Oliver Ludlow, my fellow director, sets the standard. He play-tests every single bassoon which goes through our workshop, and I have never known him to pass a bassoon without requesting changes, and sometimes one with a particularly sticky issue will go back and forth multiple times!

Also, our customers keep us on our toes – with lots of professional bassoonists coming to us to have their instruments repaired, serviced or up-graded we know that any shortcomings will be pointed out to us very quickly. But at bottom, it is the culture of the business. Having repairers as obsessed with bassoons as we are means that cutting corners or lowering standards is as anathema to them as it is to us.

How do you manage the demand for repairs given the limited number of trained repairers in the field? Have you faced any challenges in scaling up to meet that demand?

Once we got beyond one repairer we quickly found that juggling multiple customers’ bassoons, as well as the ones we were preparing for sale, became a highly complex job. So we re-thought our whole approach and developed what is now a pretty sophisticated system of managing the repair schedule, all the way from initial assessment through to final invoice and handover to the customer. This enables us to be very precise in working out what we can and can’t achieve in a particular timescale.

Beyond that, we do sometimes have immense pressures on us to meet demand, as the time between identifying the need for another repairer and having that repairer fully productive can often be at least a year. So unfortunately it can come down to declining very time-consuming work when necessary, or putting it off for a few months until we have time available, much as we hate doing this.

You’ve noted that repair services provide a buffer against economic downturns. Can you expand on how this side of the business has helped Double Reed remain stable during uncertain economic periods?

The lockdowns in the pandemic are a good case in point. Demand for new bassoons declined drastically at certain points in the pandemic owing to travel restrictions and lack of playing opportunities or teaching sessions. However, the repairs side of the business kept going and even increased, to such an extent that we didn’t furlough anyone and didn’t lose a single day’s work throughout the pandemic – all because the repairs business kept us busy.

For anyone running an instrument retailer or dealer without a well-developed repair side to the business, I would highly recommend starting one, notwithstanding the problems caused by the lack of trained repairers. As well as smoothing out cashflow it also introduces new customers into the business, some of whom may decide to upgrade to a new instrument!

Do you think there is enough interest among young people in learning these niche repair skills? How do you think the industry could encourage more people to pursue instrument repair as a career?

An interest in playing probably has to come first, so the starting point has to be to get more young people playing and loving their instruments – which would of course benefit the whole industry.

Following that, it would be good to emphasise that repairing instruments is a way of having regular day-to-day contact with both the instruments and those who play them. In other words, there is more than one way of being involved in music-making and, for some, that way could be repair as a day job, perhaps combined with playing on a part-time basis.

And, of course, because there is a shortage of repairers in the UK which is getting worse as older repairers retire, there is a good career to be made from becoming a repairer.

In your view, what is the most rewarding aspect of running a business that restores and repairs such specialised instruments?

One of the biggest kicks you can get in running a business is delighting customers. After 40 years in business in a whole range of sectors, I can honestly say that I have never been in any other business where it is possible to create so much delight for so many customers.

Returning a much-loved-but-immensely-frustrating-to-play instrument to a keen player, amateur or professional, is one of the best ways of generating delight. For the customer it can sometimes verge on being life changing, regenerating their love of playing and spurring them on to achieve greater goals.

Creating customer delight is obviously also a bonus for instrument repairers (if the job is done correctly!) and maybe should be added to the attractions of a repair career.


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