What is Antique Sound Workshop?
- Everything (and quite possibly more than) you ever wanted to know about who we are and what we offer, as well as some information about our history, our publications, and our sales policies. If you can't find the answer here, there is always E-mail, telephone, fax, or [shudder] snail mail for the hopelessly retro.
Antique Sound Workshop Catalogue
- Our extensive on-line catalogue offers more than 800 different models of recorders and an equal number of other historical woodwind, brass, string, keyboard, and percussion instruments. Our sheet music catalogue contains more than 15,000 titles the last time we counted. Feel free to download and print out any specific catalogue pages in which you are interested. However, if you're looking for something specific or want advice or guidance, it might just be quicker if you call up and ask.
ASW Information Bulletins
- These bulletins will provide you with concise, detailed, and authoritative information on various aspects of the recorder and its playing technique. If you need a crash course in some specific subject, this is a good place to start. Beginners will want to read the first five bulletins in the order listed. If you have questions not answered here, feel free to call us, but do bear in mind H. L. Mencken's dictum: "For every complex question, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." To which we would add the corollary: "For every simple question, the only correct answer is long, complex, and detailed."
Special Notices to Our Customers
We ask that all orders for plastic recorders, accessories, and/or sheet music be placed using our ASW Order Form. This will enable us to process and fill your order much more quickly and efficiently. Credit card information may be safely left on our office answering machine outside of our regular business hours if desired; please include your name, card number, expiration date, and CCV code. Because of the great volume of orders for our custom-serviced plastic recorders, we are not able to accept telephone orders for these items and ask for your cooperation and consideration of our other customers in this regard.
Thanks to a substantial improvement in the Swiss-US exchange rate since last summer, we have posted new lower prices on all Swiss-made instruments, including recorders by Küng, H. C. Fehr, and Gerhard Huber, and historical brass instruments by Adolf Egger, effective January 1st, 2012. Please be advised, however, that these prices will be in effect only until the makers post their own new prices for 2012, after which we will have to adjust our prices accordingly. There will therefore be a window of opportunity for our customers to buy Swiss instruments at their 2011 prices and the lower 2012 exchange rate for a limited period of time.
The Conrad Mollenhauer workshop has released their new price list for 2012, and we will be adjusting our prices for the first time in two years as well. The new prices will become effective on April 1st. In general, the price increases posted by the maker have been offset to some degree by an improvement in the exchange rate, with the end result that some of our new prices will be higher and others will be slightly lower than before. Mollenhauer has also announced a number of significant design changes to some older models and will be introducing a number of additional new models in the course of 2012 as well. The details are described in What's New at Antique Sound Workshop?
UPS has increased its ground and air shipping prices 5.9% for 2012, but the fuel surcharge has been reduced by 1%, so there has been a net overall increase of 4.9%. We will continue to pay the UPS Ground Shipping costs for all domestic orders over $100, but orders totaling less than that amount will be billed for shipping at the new prices, which became effective January 2nd, 2012.
New for 2010 from the workshop of Stephen Blezinger in Germany were budget-priced baroque reproduction soprano and alto recorders after P. I. Bressan at a'=440 Hz., each instrument available in a choice of either stained Brazilian boxwood or grenadilla. Antique Sound Workshop has accepted Mr. Blezinger's kind invitation to be the sole American agent for these fine recorders, and we are delighted to be able to offer these instruments at prices that are less than half those of his other baroque reproduction recorders. We have been able to achieve a slight price reduction on all four models of Bressan by Blezinger recorders for 2012.
At the request of many of our customers, we have revised and expanded our list of recommendations for Beginning Recorder Ensemble Music and separated them from the intermediate and advanced level ensemble literature. These inexpensive anthologies of elementary duets and trios will provide an excellent source of materials to develop ensemble skills and basic musicianship while simultaneously learning to play the instrument.
We have revised our price list for Dotzauer Hunting Horns, and a number of new models have also been added to our offerings. A large number of pictures of both old and new models have been added, in order to make the process of selecting among the many different models easier.
We are pleased to announce a major enhancement to our ordering and shipping procedures. Customers placing orders via our on-line ASW Order Form and requesting shipping via UPS Ground, Air, or International services will automatically receive detailed shipping, tracking, and delivery information via E-mail. Any delivery delays caused by adverse weather conditions or other problems will also be rescheduled and reported. If you wish to have us send this information to multiple E-mail addresses, simply provide the additional addresses in the information box at the bottom of the order form.
We answer all orders and inquiries promptly. A few customers have reported that they did not receive our order confirmations or shipping notifications, apparently due to overly-aggressive spam filtration by their Internet Service Provider or E-mail client. Please be certain that aswltd.com and ups.com are trusted domains in your server and personal E-mail security settings if you wish to insure that you will receive our communications.
ASW Staff E-Mail Addresses
- In order to serve you more efficiently, each member of our staff now has his or her own E-mail address. Our ASW staff directory provides you with quick and easy-to-use E-mail reply forms.
How to Place Your Order
If you want to "cut to the chase" and place an order now, go to our ASW Order Form. If you want to send us an order by E-mail, please contact our Sales Department at sales@aswltd.com. You may also call, fax, or write us.
What's New at Antique Sound Workshop?
You will find here direct links to the newest items in stock at Antique Sound Workshop. All items are in reverse chronological order, so the most recent items are listed first.
Carlton's Clearance Corner
This link will take you directly to our current inventory of pre-owned, demonstration, imperfect, discontinued, overstocked, and closeout recorders and other historical instruments.
Shortcuts to Frequently Updated Pages
These links will take you to those pages on our web site that are regularly updated with current information about historical musical instruments available from our workshop.
ASW Web Site Search Engine
If you are looking for something very specific, rather than just browsing, our new and powerful site-wide search engine will find every mention of it for you in just a few seconds.
Chrestologia Archives
We have listed the contents of all back issues of our customer newsmagazine for the last ten years of publication. Copies of some back issues are still available.
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Copyright, Antique Sound Workshop, Ltd., 2012. All rights reserved.