Beiträge von Johan VDS

Clips (and a few pics) of cymbals which I made from cracked cymbals are HERE

Even when you flip the cymbal back into shape, it will not sound the same as before it flipped inside out.
It has lost some tension due to the force, so the pitch will be lower and there may be a permanent warpage and a clash of harmonics.

But you can be lucky that the cymbal will still sound good.

Not darker but more "crunchy".

I used large and small hammers on this cymbal, but only the small hammermarks are clearly visible. As you see there are thousands of them. No factory does as much hammering; not even in Turkey.

With the small hammer I can also work in much more detail. It takes very, very much time, but my aim is to make better cymbals than what is made in the factories.

Here's an old 22" Avedis I've just finished re-creating. It was sent to me by a US drummer

Originally the cymbal was a 40's transtamp at 2649gr, sounding fairly aggressive IMO and everything but clicky. The idea was to make it lighter, more jazzy and darker but with a better stick definition.
The finish had to be a regular type of lathing, not a patina finish or banded lathing like some of my other work.
I've totally re-hammered and re-shaped it and lathed it down to 2330 grams.

Here's a before and after soundclip....

It now looks like this:

Yes, a 505 is just as good for that.

Here is the BEFORE AND AFTER CLIP

Not many, I work on a cymbal until I'm happy with it and that can take a LONG time.

A French drummer sent me this Paiste 2002 20" Ride and asked me to re-create it into a (lighter) jazzy ride. The sound he had in mind was somewhere in between a regular jazzride and a flatride.

So (amongst others) I decided to considerably downsize the cup. As Paiste 2002 is made from B8, a soft alloy, dramatically downsizing the cup is possible, given enough hammering. It also involves hammering the rest of the cymbal, but that was necessary anyway to alter the sound of the cymbal towards a jazzy sound.

I still have to make an "after" soundfile, but meanwhile here's the "before and after" picture.

Medina are made in China like Wuhan and Stagg, perhaps even in the same factory but with a different name.

They sound trashy because chinese B20 alloy (or should I say B22) usually sounds very trashy by itself.

Zitat

Original von DukeNukan
Hi Leute, ich hab ein Ajax Ride gekauft, 24 " groß. Es ist sehr dünn und leicht

All the Ajax cymbals I've seen so far were nickelsilver alloy, like the old Meinl Romen Mark, (Paiste) Super or the first generation of Paiste 101 (and many other old budget cymbals).

It probably has a thin, metallic, shrill sound without much warmth or depth.

A lot has to do with the tension in the cymbal... the tension is determined by how a cymbal is hammered.

Many factory cymbals are tensioned very high so the cymbals are very stiff. This makes them more fragile because they have no "give", no flex.

This is also the case with the heavy Zildjian Z Custom crashes. They are so stiff that they cannot absorb the shocks from heavy playing so they break.
It's not because they are thick that break...they are simply made too stiff. Excessive tension is bad for the sound too, it suffocates a lot of frequencies.
If these cymbals would be hammered to a slightly looser tension, they would both sound better and not break so fast.

Great post, Drumstudio (allthough I don't understand every word because my German is not that good )

When you downsize a cracked cymbal with more than a few millimeter to a cm (it differs for each cymbal and how it was hammered and lathed) it will usually start to sound unmusical and gongy.

The cymbal becomes relatively thicker, the shape is not correct anymore and the tension gets disturbed. Some cymbals will actually flip inside out automatically because of the disturbed tension.

The only way to deal with this is totally rehammering the cymbal and then lathe it to the correct taper and thickness again.

Heavily downsized cymbals of which the cup becomes too big in relationship to the rest of the cymbal can be hammered into great effects-cymbals.

With sheet-alloy like B8 or B15 I can sometimes make the cup a lot smaller so it fits the size of the cymbal again.

Luke Flowers from the Cinematic Orchestra will now also be playing my cymbals. He visited me this week when the band was touring Europe and left with almost 2 full setups of cymbals.

You have a picture?

Zitat

Original von Hochi
Die Serie gab es, wenn ich mich nicht irre, von 1978 bis 1987. Manche Modelle klingen wirklich gut

Paiste 505 and 404 are old budget models from Paiste, BUT back in those days they were still hammered quite intensively, totally hammered into shape (be it with a machine hammer but still). Usually their sound is much better/richer than the present day Paiste budget models which are now first pressed into shape and then only sparsely afterhammered.

If I had to choose between Alpha's and 505's, I would certainly take 505's.

Thanks Arrowfreak !

Zitat

Original von Drumstudio1
Wenn das alles nichts hilft nochmal den Rand mehrfach mit den Fingerkuppen "abfahren" und ab- bzw. "umtasten"!

Very good advice !
Also use a magnifying glass.

Here's a TRACK recorded during a jam-session on which you can hear my cymbals being played by British studio/session drummer Emre Ramazanoglu. He has been playing my cymbals for a while. As you'll hear, he uses a selection of my trashier cymbals

To rule out any misunderstandings, he doesn't endorse my cymbals but he has given up his Zildjian endorsement because he wanted to play my cymbals.
I simply don’t give endorsements to anyone since the “blanks” I prefer to use (mainly professional Zildjian, Sabian and Ufip cymbals) are far too expensive and my profits are very low as it is. Also, I don’t even charge half of my work when modifying other people's cymbals. So if you see anyone famous playing my cymbals… they have payed for them, just like anybody else.

Anyway, Emre is awesome drummer and he is also an engineer/producer, so I am proud that he prefers to play my cymbals. He has recorded and worked with artists such as
Shakira
Prodigy
Tricky
Afrika Bambaata
Alison Moyet
Sneaker Pimps
Keith Tippet
Jim Abbiss
Neil Macllellan
Mekon

Emre also plays drums (and my cymbals) on the forthcoming Lou Rhodes album (out in september), which he has also produced. Lou Rhodes is the singer from the British triphop-band Lamb.

Zitat

Original von Paiste
Aus der FAQ zum Thema Hämmerung:

This is totally untrue. You can give a cymbal a high or low profile by every means of hammering of pressing. Sometimes I hammer very flat cymbals into very high profiles.

With handhammering you can give a cymbal a low or high tone depending on how you hammer it. So a handhammered cymbal doesn't have to sound low or dark. It can also sound bright and have a lot of overtones. It all depends on the hammering technique.

Next to that, there's handhammering and handhammering. Sabian "Handhammereds" cannot be compared to Turkish handhammered cymbals. The Sabians only got a very small amount of handhammering (after having been shaped with a machine), not at all enough to give it the complex sound of a really extensively hand-hammered cymbal.

In general you can say that an extensively handhammered cymbal will have a richer tone than a machine hammered cymbal. The sound will have more "layers" and will give the opportunity to the drummer to be more creative.

Within hand-hammering a big difference should be made between shape-hammering and sound-hammering. Most mass produced hand-hammered cymbals like the Turkish and a lot of Chinese brands are only shape-hammered. Most of the hammerers in the factory are only able to roughly shape a cymbal, they can't really make the sound optimal by strategic hammering, they don't have enough training for that. Most of the hammerers are not drummers and don't even know how a good cymbal should sound, their job is just to shape them as fast as they can. Every factory does have a few more experienced "master"smiths who can do corrections, but there's no time correct every cymbal really well. That's why the mass-produced hand-hammered cymbals are so inconsistent. Some can sound good, some can sound very bad and totally unmusical, it's all coincidence. It was like this with the old K's too.

Really handhammering a cymbal to perfection takes MUCH more time than the factories can spend on a cymbal.

The big factories that do machine hammering spend less and less time on hammering so the sound of the "professional" cymbals becomes "cheaper" all the time. They are trying to find tricks to hammer cymbals faster and with less strokes, like Sabian HHX or many K Zildjians (even Constantinoples) are hammered with a giant machine-hammer into huge dents. Like this K Zildjian on the pic below. In that way they can hammer a cymbal with fewer strokes and in much less time...but the sound loses dimension and depth. Machine hammering used to be more extensive in the past, but now even machine hammering is reduced to a ridiculously low amount. Actually K Constantinoples aren't hammered more than the average K, so they should not be more expensive.

Same problem, it will crack on the fissure because that has become too hot.

A cymbal made from B20 alloy should not be heated. When you do that, the metal will become extremely fragile.

If a part of the cymbal becomes really hot, afterwards it will crack like an eggshell when you hit it.