RE-CREATING cymbals by hand-hammering

[Johan VDS]

Here's a really old and very thin nickelsilver 22" Meinl Romen Mark ride ( a real beginner's cymbal) which I recently re-created into a complex crashride for a Dutch drummer.

Nickelsilver is generally a poor and cheap sounding alloy, but for some purposes it can be interesting.

Here is the BEFORE AND AFTER CLIP

[Johan VDS]

A French drummer asked me to convert a flattish 16" Wuhan windgong into ... "a cymbal".

Because of the brittle nature of chinese B20 I was rather hesitant, especially because the process would also involve cold-hammering a cup, which is always a risky procedure with B20 alloy.
But he insisted and was prepared to take full responsibility if anything went wrong.
Luckily it didn't.

The gong appeared to be not round, extremely irregular in thickness (yes, typically chinese), very lopsided and full of really deep "lathe chatter", so I had to get rid of all the thickness irregularities. This cannot be done on a lathe, so I actually had to grind down the whole gong to the thickness of its thinnest spot, so the whole gong would be of a uniform thickness. Just doing this took several hours.

First I hammered a cup, drilled a hole, did some initial bow hammering, then I grinded away all the thickness irregularities, hammered the bow in various sessions (with several lathing sessions in between the hammering sessions) and finished off with a patina-treatment and a little extra lathing.

The weight was reduced from over 1600 grams to roughly 1050 grams. It's now a 16" dark trashy crash.

Here's a BEFORE AND AFTER clip.







Some pics of the process:

[drumzealot]

This link does not work for me? Does it work for anyone else?

Originally Posted by Johan VDS

Here's a really old and very thin nickelsilver 22" Meinl Romen Mark ride ( a real beginner's cymbal) which I recently re-created into a complex crashride for a Dutch drummer.

Nickelsilver is generally a poor and cheap sounding alloy, but for some purposes it can be interesting.

Here is the BEFORE AND AFTER CLIP

[Johan VDS]

Here are some of my louder cymbals...

YouTube - Johan VDS drumsolo oct 2007

[Johan VDS]

A drummer from Finland sent me this 22" Istanbul Agop "Tony Williams" ride. I rehammered it into something that (in my opinion) sounds much more like the real Tony Williams ride from his years with Miles Davis.

BEFORE AND AFTER

[Johan VDS]

A superb French jazzdrummer sent me this very hollow sounding 20" Istanbul Agop Signature. It was (and still is) only 1477 grams and barked more than anything else you can imagine. I didn't take off any weight but I've totally re-hammered and re-shaped it.


Here's a BEFORE AND AFTER clip

[Wout Blommers]

To those who think a cymbal can't be improved, the following short story...

In the end the sixties of the former century I was visitng a large percussion shop in Rotterdam, named Hakkert. At the time Duke Ellingtons Big Band would be playing in the concert hall over there. (I was at the concert :) Most drummers don't carry their equipment around the world, so they 'lend' from shops. Ellingtons drummer was there, made his choise for a good set of cymbals, asked for a wooden plate and took out a little hammer. He searched using the wooden handle of the hammer ticking on the cymbal for the right spot, marked these using ashes from his cigaret and hit the cymbal several times, firm, but very controlled. And the cymbal sounded wonderful! The shop sold these very expensive to special costumers

Wout