JACKSON, Wis. (AP) - Nestled in an office building just off the Highway 45 exit in Jackson, Matthew Walker and Michael McLemore were busy in the shop of their new business, M&W Custom Trombones LLC.
Though it isn’t fully operational, the two have established its presence and are performing limited work, the Daily News in West Bend reported.
McLemore said they have an international customer base through professional connections.
The two were the faces of the company where they worked prior to starting M&W Custom Trombones.
McLemore hopes to step back into that clientele quickly, noting an email the two had just received from an interested customer in the United Kingdom.
“We have a number of orchestral players in (the U.S.) who are saying, ’As soon as you’ve got a horn, I’d love to try it out,’” Walker said. “The market is there, the difference in the market being we are very much detail-oriented.” McLemore compared the difference of their work to others in the industry as the difference between a Ford and a Ferrari.
Walker spoke of the personal satisfaction of owning a business.
“The idea of being able to start a company that’s got our names on it, and that’s our baby, is something that’s really exciting,” he said.
McLemore and Walker said though they’re not quite ready to start sending out custom trombones, they can provide services such as repairs.
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McLemore discovered his love of music at a young age. He grew up in southeastern Arkansas and attended church “twice on Sundays, once on Wednesdays,” and music was a big part of the congregation.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in music education. “I thought I’ll just be a school band director. That seems pretty fun,” he said.
“Toward my junior year, my play got better and better and my private instructor there said, ’Maybe you want to think about doing a graduate degree in performance.’” So, McLemore headed to the University of Texas at Austin to earn his master’s degree and work on a doctorate.
Walker grew up in Dubbo, Australia, five hours northwest of Sydney. He said his fourth-grade teacher got him into music.
“He was the local brass band master,” Walker said. “One day he called me in as a 9-year-old, (and) said, ’Have a try at this.’” After Walker discovered he liked playing the trombone, his teacher let him take it home.
At 16 years old, Walker moved to Sydney to finish high school at the Conservatorium High School. He then started a degree from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
He said he didn’t graduate because he secured a full-time playing job with the Australian Opera at age 21.
The two ended up working at the same company, which closed its doors in 2012.
“We took a couple years and got our finances together and got started,” McLemore said. “First it was a lot of drawing out parts and thinking up concepts and things like that, now we’re finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of it.”
Walker is married to Sue Beekman, who is the company’s business manager. The two live in Jackson with Beekman’s two sons.
McLemore lives in West Bend with his wife, Elsa, and two sons.
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Attached to the M&W Custom Trombones office space is the shop, where McLemore and Walker craft the instruments.
The tall ceilings have fans running. A long bench against one of the walls holds four stacks of bells. To the right of that is a station where they work on valve casings.
Since making these instruments is so specialized, it sometimes calls for special instruments to craft them.
Walker pointed to a tool he made that they use to weld casings.
Walker spoke on the degree of variations the knuckles can have.
McLemore strapped on a work apron and protective glasses to put on a demonstration.
After placing the pieces to the casing together in the contraption, he heated them with a blow torch. He then took the time to make sure everything was just right before soldering it all.
After that, the piece took a bath in a phosphoric acid solution.
Walker said this was a very old-school process, and the attention to detail was something the clients desired.
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