When my son decided to join the school band, I was shocked at the price of buying new instruments and at the cost of renting. I decided to try a pawn shop. Lucky Loan had a large selection of the smaller instruments. They were up front in that they didn't know much about them, but that they'd been checked out by a local music store. Best of all, they said that if we purchased one and the band teacher didn't think it was a good instrument we could trade it for another one. They even gave us a new mouthpiece. Well, the band teacher loved it, and I guess we were the lucky ones because it turned out that our clarinet was a professional instrument and worth a lot of money. That aside, we have purchased all of our band instruments from Lucky Loan. It's much cheaper than renting or buying new.
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