Paiste 24″ Giant Beat Multi-Functional (Ride) Cymbal

Paiste’s Giant Beat series consists of a 24″, 18″, and 20″ “Multi-functional”, and 14″ and 15″ Hi-Hats. They have a very distinctive sound that one might call “Retro Rock”, as the ping is crisp. The 18″, 20″, and 24″ are labeled as “Multi-functional” because they can be used as rides or crashes. Here, we review the 24″ version, which is essentially a ride cymbal. Paiste calls it a medium thin, but at nearly 3,000 gm, I would call it medium to medium heavy.

The entire cymbal is finely lathed, but only the body of the cymbal is hammered, and the hammer marks are immediately adjacent to one another rather than spaced any significant distance apart. The sound of the ride has a strong ping with a very noticeable ring to the wash. It’s a very intense cymbal, and would serve nicely as a very powerful crash at a rock concert. The bell does not have as much ring to it as the body.

The spectrum has large peaks at 290 Hz, 360 Hz, and 470 Hz, followed by lower peaks between 850 Hz and 2.7 kHz. The response then slopes upward to 15 kHz before dropping off sharply at 16 kHz, then slowly declining to 65 kHz.

Overall, this is a very bright cymbal with a bright wash to go with it. Very unusual. Even the color is distinctive, as if they gave it a thin nickel electroplating at the end of the production process. The coating gives the cymbal a slightly different color than typical B8 cymbals.

The ping does not decline rapidly, as shown in the graph below, but maintains significant sound level out to 0.3 seconds.

Click HERE to listen to an audio sample, which will include crash (when appropriate), ride, and bell sounds (these are 24 bit, 176.4 kHz wav files, so be sure your sound card is capable of handling these high resolution sound files).

If your sound card cannot play the high resolution file, click HERE to listen to an MP3 sound file.

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