Introduction to Cymbal Reviews – John E. Johnson, Jr.

Introduction to Cymbal Reviews – John E. Johnson, Jr.

In the course of reviewing products for Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity, I was measuring the frequency spectrum of cymbals (I am also a drummer) using laboratory-grade microphones calibrated to plus or minus 0.5 dB, 20 Hz – 30 kHz. I discovered that cymbals produce frequencies out to 60 kHz in some cases, far beyond what is recorded on CDs. It was also very interesting to see the differences in the spectra for various cymbal types and their rates of decay. So, I decided to start reviewing cymbals, but in far greater detail than you will find in any drum magazine. The reviews will have my overall impression of the sound, accompanied by a full spectrum analysis and a loudness vs time spectrum which shows the decay over time.

My recording “studio” is in my test lab (for measuring audio products), which has absorption panels on the walls and ceiling. There is also wall-to-wall carpet. I have to use a computer to record the samples, so I bought some sound damping panels to place in front of the computer. I place a cymbal stand at the other end of the room as far away from the computer as possible. I use two microphone stands, one on either side of the test cymbal, with the two microphones (Earthworks M30BX) pointed down at a 45 degree angle, at about 40% in from the edge of the cymbal, and about 5 inches distance from the surface of the cymbal. The microphones are highly directional, so their major sensitivity is to sound in front of them, on-axis.

To record the cymbal sounds, either crash or ride, I use a 5B hickory drumstick with a nylon tip. For crash cymbals, I strike the cymbal from the front, at a 45 degree angle to the cymbal, perpendicular to the direction that the microphones are pointing in towards the cymbal. I strike it at a strength that one would use when performing (relatively hard). For ride cymbals, I strike the front of the cymbal (one strike) using the nylon tip, with the strength that one would use when riding the cymbal during a performance, again perpendicular to the microphones, at about 40% in from the edge.

The digital recording is at 176.4 kHz sampling frequency (CDs use 44.1 kHz) and 24 bit depth (CDs have a 16 bit depth). I normalize each sample to 0 dB, which is the upper limit of digital recording. Then, I edit the sample so that the beginning of the sample is at the front edge of the sound (when the stick struck the cymbal) and trim it so that the length of the sample is 2 seconds.

I play the samples in SpectraPlus software, which uses FFT analysis to produce the spectra. The sound card is a Lynx L22, which records and plays digital samples up to 200 kHz sampling frequency and 24 bit depth. In analog audio terms, this means it will record sounds as high as 100 kHz. The microphones are connected to the Lynx card input via XLR so they are balanced, which helps to eliminate any noise picked up by the microphone cable.

In the spectra for the cymbal, you will see two graph lines. The magenta one is the peak sound, i.e., right at the beginning of the cymbal sound. The yellow line is the sound at the end of the sample, i.e., 2 seconds, and it illustrates the decay.

You will also see a graph that shows the sound level over a 1 second time period, from the initial contact of the stick with the cymbal.

All of the signal shown in the spectra is from the microphone. It is calibrated out to 30 kHz but there is a version of the mic that is calibrated out to 50 kHz. So, the data are accurate out to 30 kHz, and the information beyond that is sound, but it is just not calibrated.

For those of you who are producing CDs of your band, you might request that a high resolution version of your album be uploaded to one of the websites that are now offering high resolution versions of music albums for download (such as hdtracks.com). SACD and DVD-A have not been successful, and it is expensive for studios to release high resolution discs only to have just a few albums sold. But it does not cost them anything to put the two-channel master that is still in its original high sampling rate (usually 88.2 kHz, 24 bit) on one of these websites. The consumer selects an album, pays by credit card, downloads the album, and plays it on his computer or burns it to a DVD-A and plays it on a universal Blu-ray player. The bottom line is that only about 1/3 of our cymbal sound is ending up on the CD. We can’t really “hear” those ultra-high frequencies, but there is research that indicates we can sense them by other means, including bone conduction.

I have been a drummer for a very long time. I just turned 65 (August 21, 2010), and I started drumming in college when I was 20. At first, it was just four of us, one of my fraternity brothers played bass, I was on the drums, a singer, and a lead guitarist who had happened to live a few blocks from Jimi Hendrix. He was heavily influenced by Hendrix – of course – and he was only 15 when he joined our band. That’s him on the far right in the first photo. I think this photo was somewhere around early 1968.

At that age, I certainly did not have the money to invest in a big kit, not even a new kit. I had to rent one. I finally saved enough money to buy one cymbal, as seen in the photo. I continued to rent used drum kits for the two remaining years I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, in Seattle. After about a year, an organist joined us, with his Hammond B3 and Leslie speaker, as well as a 12 string rhythm guitarist. He was skilled enough to play lead solo as well as rhythm backup, so we got to be pretty good. We played night clubs and bars, and if you wanted to know if we classified ourselves as a garage band, well, let’s put it this way. One weekend, we had to use Friday night’s wages to bail the rhythm guitarist out of jail so we could play on Saturday night.

Obviously, we didn’t make a lot of money at this, but it was fun. Because I had enough money to rent the used drums, but never seemed to acquire enough funds to get a few more cymbals, that lack of having a full cymbal set stuck with me over the years in the back of my brain. I graduated in 1968, got married, and moved to New Orleans for graduate school. That was the end of the band, for the time being.

During graduate school and for years afterward, I didn’t have the time to play drums with a group, and didn’t have enough room to set them up in our apartment, so active playing just wasn’t in the cards for me at that time.

I ended up in Baltimore, Maryland, doing research at NIH. I became disenchanted with bench science, left NIH, and started my own company, focusing on editing medical journals for John Wiley & Sons. Now, all of a sudden, I did have the space because we had purchased a house, and I had the time.

However, I still didn’t have a lot of money, so I bought (a step up from renting) a used set of Rogers drums for $150. I starting taking lessons, and bit by bit, I satisfied that old thing in the back of my head about never having a full set of cymbals.

There was a local music store that had all their cymbals on a 30 foot long rack, and you could swing a cymbal out, use a stick to play a ride pattern, or crash it, swing it back in and try another one.

This was like a candy store for me. I found that I had a craving for cymbals. As you can see in this photo, taken in 1987, I ended up in a short time with all the cymbals that I could handle.

Then we moved to California, and ding dang it, I didn’t have the room for a drum kit. So, I sold the drums, but kept the cymbals.

Jump forward to 2002. By then, I not only was editing the medical journals, but I had started a hi-fi magazine called Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity on the Internet. I converted the garage to a test lab where I could test CD players, amplifiers, speakers, etc. I purchased a snare drum to practice rudiments, but that was about it.

Then, in 2009, during a visit to our local music store, which happened to have a huge drum department, I sat down at a Roland electronic drum kit, and it was love at first sight (and sound). Here was something that I could fit in the lab. So, I purchased it piece by piece and ended up with four drum pads for toms, and a pad for the kick, paired with a double bass pedal. The drum module is a Roland TD-4, which stores numerous drum as well as cymbal sounds in digital sample format. The next photo, shown below, was taken in May, 2010.

I had originally used three pads for toms and one for the snare, but I found that I could not get the dynamics from snare drum samples that I could with an acoustic snare, so I moved that fourth pad to being tom number 4 and purchased an acoustic snare (Tama, Stewart Copeland model). As you see in the photo, I also got five cymbal pads. Why five? I realized and accepted the fact that I was obsessed with cymbals, dating back to when I couldn’t afford to purchase them, and I decided to just let my obsession express itself. I bought Roland CY-8 cymbal pads because they were small and I could fit all five in a close arrangement to my sitting position. The kick pad is a Roland KD-8, again, small so it would not take up much space.

I ended up with a high hat stand (DW 9000) and three cymbal stands, and I tied everything together with Gibraltar clamps and chrome tubing, forming a U-shaped setup. To move the kit when I am just listening to music, using those big ribbon speakers you see in the background, all I have to do is loosen the clamps that attach each stand, and move the stands to the rear of the room, as all of the drums and cymbals are attached to the three cymbal stands.

Besides being obsessed with buying cymbals, I was also obsessed with the sound of the cymbals, and for a few months, I was happy with the sound from the cymbal pads (which are electronic triggers for the cymbal digital sound samples). I not only used the samples in the Roland TD-4 drum module, I also recorded my own cymbal samples using laboratory grade calibrated microphones, and triggered them through BFD version 2 drum software. You can see the computer in the background of the photo, where I boot BFD. The computer is connected to the Roland TD-4 drum module via a MIDI/USB cable. (MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.)

I used real ride cymbals and hi hat cymbals because I didn’t like the feel of ride cymbal pads or hi hat pads, but I was also beginning to notice something, and now we are coming to the point of this dissertation. The sounds of the crash cymbals seemed incomplete. They didn’t have the brightness or clarity that real cymbals have. There was a distinct difference between the real crash cymbals that I had and the samples of those exact same cymbals that I was triggering from the cymbal pads.

Now, keep in mind that I was (and still am) using my reference audio system to play the drum samples through. This consists of a Pure Class A tube preamplifier, two 1,200 watt McIntosh monoblock power amplifiers, and the those two ribbon speakers, each of which has a 60” ribbon and four 12” woofers. So, I could not only hear everything in the samples, but also, what was missing (not to mention that I can blow the walls out with all that power).

The cymbal samples were recorded at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, which is the same quality as found on a CD, and is the sample rate supported by the drum triggering module.

So, I expanded my horizons and began recording cymbal sounds at higher sampling frequencies, and discovered that cymbals produce frequencies well above 20 kHz (the limit on a CD is 22 kHz), and in fact, above 30 kHz all the way out to 60 kHz, maybe even a bit further. The samples recorded at 44.1 kHz also sounded mushy, and when I looked at the spectrum of the recorded samples, I realized why. Cymbals produce what is probably the most complex sound of any musical instrument. When you hit a crash cymbal, the frequencies it is making all at the same time span 30 Hz up to well beyond 30 kHz. That is very tough to reproduce with basic CD quality sampling.

I began recording and analyzing the spectra of all kinds of cymbals and noted that each one has its own distinct “fingerprint” that one could use to characterize the sound. I decided to share that information, because there is nothing like it out there anywhere that I can find, and so, here we are.

In describing cymbals, manufacturers distinguish between “Cast” and “Sheet Metal” cymbals. Strictly speaking, the cast cymbals are more accurately called “Forged”, because casting means that you pour the molten metal into a mold that usually has two halves tightly connected together. The metal hardens, the halves of the mold are pulled open, and the cast metal piece is released. Sharp edges and the seam where the two halves of the mold came together may be smoothed by sanding, but the structure is pretty much finished at that point.

With cymbal making, the cast portion is really either a block of alloy, called an ingot, or a cast disc of alloy. It is heated above the recrystallization temperature and rolled between two round rotating presses, making it flat. It may be quenched in water at this point. Then it is reheated, and put through the rollers again, in a different direction, so that, ultimately, after several runs through the press, it is round. Then it is placed in a press that produces the bell, and following the final quenching, which “anneals” the metal, making it stronger and less likely to break when played, the cymbal is trimmed on the edges to make it the right diameter, a hole is drilled in the middle of the bell, and the cymbal is ready for hammering and lathing. The exact details of temperature, as well as the number of times the alloy is heated and quenched, are proprietary. Since the hot metal is shaped by force, that makes it a forged metal product, not simply cast.

With a “Sheet Metal” cymbal, the alloy arrives at the factory in sheet form. Discs of the desired cymbal diameter are cut from the sheet metal, the bell is pressed into the cymbal, and it is then hammered and lathed. The hammering and lathing processes are pretty much the same for all the companies, and you can watch videos on YouTube that illustrate this process. In any case, Forged vs Cast is a matter of semantics, but there is a distinct difference in the sound between a forged cymbal and a sheet metal cymbal. The forged cymbal has a much more prominent wash, and with a crash cymbal, a longer sustain. However, there are some very good sheet metal cymbals, and you should judge the cymbals by their sound, not the process by which they are made, or their price (sheet metal cymbals are much less expensive than forged cymbals).

Now, I purchase about one new cymbal per month (I really am trying to satisfy that cymbal lust buried in my brain 40 years ago), so I have a nice array to test, for the time being. I hope to obtain additional cymbals directly from all the manufacturers to add to this database of spectra. Feel free to make suggestions as to cymbals you would like to have tested by spectral analysis, in a post in this thread, if you wish. There will be a link at the end of each cymbal review that you can click on to download an audio sample of the cymbal under test. The spectra can only convey only so much information. The final analysis is in the listening. The only thing you will need is a sound card that can play digital audio files (*.wav) recorded at 176.4 kHz and 24 bits. They are the highest resolution cymbal audio sample files ever offered as downloads. I would hope that someday, drum control modules will be able to store and trigger samples at high sampling frequencies and 24 bit depth.

My setup in August, 2010 is shown in the photo below. I rotate the crash cymbals through my collection about once every three months. I still have one cymbal pad that I use for special effects.

Here is my latest setup, February, 2011. I added a Matt Nolan custom 22″ ride cymbal, which is the rusty-looking cymbal near the bottom center part of the photo.

The last photo was taken in 1968, in one of the Seattle, Washington night clubs we played in, called “The Door”. Like many bands, we changed our name several times. I used matched grip, and I placed my left leg such that I could bring my left hand down with the drumstick so that every stroke was a rimshot. I placed a single strip of tape along the middle of the bottom of the drum, crosswise, to hold the snares against the drum. This made the snare drum sound like a 12 gauge shotgun when we were cranking some Hendrix or Cream. It was about that time that I noticed my ears would ring all night long after a gig, so I began placing a small wad of toilet paper in each ear before we played. I suggest that for those of you playing venues where you have the volume up, definitely wear ear plugs. I get them in a jar from a QVS drugstore containing several hundred ear plugs for about $10.

There was one night at The Door where I was shredding so hard – and I didn’t have a drum rug – that the bass drum with its attached tom fell off the front of the stage onto the back of our lead guitarist. We continued playing, and I kept the bass drum pedal going even with no bass drum, while the club staff put the bass drum back on the stage in front of me, and they nailed a 2×4 in front of the bass drum to keep it from moving. The girl to my right was dancing next to my 24″ ride cymbal that I played hard on most songs. Her ears probably were ringing all night long too.

Ah, those were the days!

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