Jojo Mayer requested that Sabian design a cymbal that could be all-purpose, namely crash and ride. Of course, you can crash and ride any cymbal, but the sound that is produced is not often suitable. So, Sabian came up with the Omni. Currently, they are available in two sizes, 18″ and 22″. This review covers the 18″ version, and I have to say that the design works very well.
When crashed, it sounds like a crash. And when played as a ride on the outer region, the sound has a intense wash, while the inner region next to the bell has a drier ride sound. The cymbal truly is Omni.
The bell is not lathed or hammered, and the region next to the bell is hammered with the hammering spaced very close together. The outer region of the cymbal is only lathed. This gives you not only the crash availability, but two distinct ride sounds.
The crash spectrum has a peak at 50 Hz, then slowly rises to 500 Hz where it remains smooth until about 10 kHz, whereupon it declines to 55 kHz.
The Level vs. Time spectrum indicates that the crash peaks at 0.1 seconds, making it a moderately fast crash.
I also measured the spectrum of the first 0.5 second of a single ping (so that we are looking mainly at the spectrum of the ping and not the wash) on the outer and inner (next to the bell) regions of the cymbal. The first graph below is the spectrum from the outer region and the second graph is from the inner region. Notice that the inner region next to the bell has less lower frequencies and more energy at 10 kHz than the outer region that is not hammered. This means the inner region has a brighter ping sound to it when riding the cymbal, but of course, you can ride both regions, with two distinct sound patterns.
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). In this case, there are two ride sound samples. The first one is on the outer region, and the second one is on the region next to the bell.
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