Cymbal making is one of those weird processes that straddles the line between art and science. You’re trying to make something that will live in the world of being musical, a nebulous world indeed, but it’s born in the gritty world of an old school factory. The process still looks vaguely medieval, even if there is a punch clock around there somewhere.
The lathe process caught my eye in the video. Buncha Morlocks and Orcs shovel the cymbal blanks around the cavern for a while, then a guy starts spinning it like he’s making a salad bowl, and he becomes this sort of audio Cellini, shearing the alloy blank to make it lighter and brighter. You can still see the grooves the lathe dude leaves in the cymbal when you examine one on a bandstand. They’re a human artifact on a mass-produced item; that’s very rare in this world. The only human artifact on a mass-produced item I’ve purchased recently is a fingerprint on the inside of the lens of my snapshot camera, which has been blurring a spot on my photos for half a decade at this point.
My eleven-year-old son strikes Sabian cymbals,the same ones that his father struck before him, so this video is like a postcard from an old friend. Here the boy when he was only nine, whacking on the things, along with his brother. He’s hitting just the cymbals, not the cymbals and the brother, I mean. They only hit each other when the camera’s off.
6 Responses
he's only spinning like he's making a salad bowl from wood… that is to say he's not making it like this guy. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43N44ICyuEU) which is something i use to do at a point in my career, on a lathe built in the '30s.
the metal is rough shaped by stamping and then spun to cut off metal.
i like his dad too. the wisdom to know when to push the chick from the nest resulted in a life time of profitable passion. (as opposed to passion for drink)
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Who doesn't love the classics?
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
D
Is that your old drum set under the cloth in behind the 9 year old? My brother is a drummer. No one listens to him now. He has an electronic drum set with headphones that his wife bought him. He just listens to himself. He used to make too much noise in the garage. Sometimes he plays with others but not often.
Is that your old drum set under the cloth in behind the 9 year old? My brother is a drummer. No one listens to him now. He has an electronic drum set with headphones that his wife bought him. He just listens to himself. He used to make too much noise in the garage. Sometimes he plays with others but not often.
The Rustic Overtones are goodhearted guys. They've played a bunch of times at the home of a young guy who is bedfast from a progressively paralyzing spinal disease. His name is Nickolas Stanley. They set up right in his living room where his bed is. He's a friend of my son Matthew, who won't hear a bad word said about the Overtones.