The Birth of a Cymbal

Howdy,

If you follow my work, you might have noticed that over these past three years I’ve only made two flat rides. And no, them selling uber-slowly is not the reason behind it. Many other rides I make sell slowly and I still keep at them. Point being exemplified nowhere better than by the High-Bell O.a.ks; I haven’t sold a single one, and you better believe I will be making more of them sooner than later. Even if they seem to accumulate and dust up, I still love their sound, and moreover, I love the process of making them and the challenges attached to it. I have a hunch, or rather hope, that at some point someone will resonate with them the way I do, but their lingering nature at my workshop’s cymbal organizer is totally unrelated to their production rate.



So no, the reason for the lacking amount of flat rides within my body of work is exactly what most of you might have already assumed. I mean, once again, if you follow my work, another thing you are probably aware of is the multiple casual posts about bells, often accompanied by a family album’s worth of glam pictures showcasing my favorite ones —or the ones where I think I achieved something difficult with satisfactory results. I know, it might come as no surprise to you that I may have a ‘small’ infatuation with the bells in my instruments, hence, not many flat rides. After all, I use the statement “All bells hand formed” as part of my brand’s motto, which is something that very few active cymbal-smiths nowadays would commit to, mainly given the added work time, potential lack of consistency, added risks and blank irregularities. 



Though, I feel the need to do a parenthesis here to clarify that at this point I have actually broken that motto. Not deceitfully —as I have clearly marked and identified the very few instruments I’ve made with pressed bells in any publication where they appear— and actually not even willingly. Months ago I received an erroneous order from my provider that had pressed bells in all of its blanks. They amended their mistake by sending me the correct order of flat blanks without center holes at no extra charge. But, between other serious mishaps and unfavorable situations I had been put on thanks to their, sometimes, neglecting behavior, as a good gesture, they agreed on allowing me to keep the pressed bell blanks for a price I will not disclose here. If you have’em, use’em, right? And so, If you are of the crowd that liked the O.a.k OSP’s, those were the first pressed bell cymbals in my workshop’s ‘history’ (very lax use of the word history), accompanied by half of the first batch of Cortezas, whom also had pressed bells.



Admission and introduction aside, I am not here to talk about those few individuals, but rather, my relationship with hand made bells, the reason why they are a part of my brand and maybe some fun insights into their behavior. So, let’s start from the beginning of all things related to me, my ego. 



I have a perspective which I know is most definitely erroneous: I feel as if I could only claim a cymbal as my own creation if I had made it entirely from bell to edge. This idea masked as a feeling forces me to have shaped every blank it in its entirety if I want to look at it and feel satisfied with myself. I justify it as a behavior fueled by the love of the craft and a desire for deep practice immersion, but I have a hunch there are other psychological forces behind it. I would imagine a luthier doing excruciating work to shape, build, glue, refine, sand, etc the resonant body on one of his pieces, but then, just going ahead and buying a pre-made neck, sticking it there and calling it a day... it cheapens his work, it makes it impersonal. I know that analogy is fraught. I know the concept of craft ownership via severe absolutism doesn’t fly, it isn’t solid. I mean, I know a lot happens to a blank before I even get to lay my hands on it, none of which I am responsible for or can affect. I know that the game of tags, titles and appraisals is one that usually only pompous disconnected folk tend to play. Truth is, nobody really pays that much attention to what processes were responsible for creating which parts of a whole, people tend to look at the final result and take it as it is. But to me, to my impossibly intractable vision, it was just an inescapable room I had built and trapped myself inside; if I wanted to make cymbals I had to fully make all of them, those were the rules of my game.



So, bell making started as a desire to fulfill a nomenclative status, as just a way to satisfy my ego by being able to claim the 'entirety’ of my work as my own, all while understanding a blank —not copper and tin— as my raw material.

At that time I was just pretty much going at it in a very intuitive fashion, as long as they looked bell-like I was usually happy. But as months passed and I kept making more and more cymbals, things started to shift. The change was prompted out of a deep sonic dissatisfaction with everything I was producing at the time. In the search of that hidden square inch of metal I had yet to move, shape and bend correctly, I started looking at the bell as the possible cove where the secret to a successful cymbal laid yet to be grasped. In every other area of the body I was constantly tweaking and mixing up things. I was constantly reshaping and changing my hammers, lathing in different patterns, accentuating this and that, using different bits, leaving here and there untouched, or leaving no part of the cymbal without a hammer print..all to no avail. Naturally, l came to look at the bell as the only possible remaining spot of the instrument I hadn’t properly played with just yet. And so, from a capricious desire, now bell-making was also a desperate look for that which I hadn’t found and hoped to encounter, an answer to the question “what am I still doing wrong, and where do I poke to make all of it ‘right’?”



It is worth noting at this point that most of these psychological maladies and trifles that bent and confused my ears lived inside me and had little to do with the outer world. Yes, I’ve always had a bit of a harsh unrelenting behavior towards myself. I don’t really ever pat myself in the back for ‘the attempt’, I only do so if I determine I’ve reached a previously set milestone. Most of my gripes against my work were of my own construction. They were, and still are, in part, my superiority complex manifesting itself and demanding justification for its existence. Yet, all of the headbutts, anxieties, depressions, inner fights and determinations of failure felt —and still feel— very real. I still hold a need, even if less acrid, to surpass an invisible barrier of acceptability. I’ve always assumed I am an objective enough judge of my work, and still I fall short of my standards more often than not. I am aware now and then, that ‘the audience’ doesn’t see and hear things as I do, regardless, I needed a level of clarity and functionality from my instruments that had to be pair to its aesthetic beauty according to me. Interesting complexity and ear grabbing frequencies were not enough if the thing wasn’t able to accomplish a certain set of functional tasks as main ride. As I write, I’ve been able to balance myself a bit better, to be more flexible, understanding and patient with my ears —plus, accepting of the customer’s usually positive perspective. But at the time frame I am describing in this piece, that wasn’t the case entirely, so, please bare that in mind.



Anyway, back on track. After a while at the process of bell tweaking and exploration, I started to see with increased clarity the very specific challenges in raising a bell that acted as fences on the road I was trying to traverse. Thanks to them, little by little my relationship with the bell had once again transformed. I had now added the ‘competitive practice’ of metal bending exercises to the roaster of reasons for which I had to make my bells myself.

I grew fast into an obsession with how much I could push the material in any one direction without messing it up. I wanted to be better at physically molding the small details that I thought mattered, less for their sonic outcome than their visual aspect: how precisely and uniformly I was able to shape a curve, how consistently I was able manufacture them, how steep and well defined I was able to make the transition, how rugged or smooth of a surface I was able to create, how dense, etc. Their physicality and feasibility had become as important to me as their possible effect on the overall aural landscape of a cymbal. 

By then, I had already started to feel the smallest inklings of satisfaction with my work. But, with how much I was constantly changing my processes, and dichotomically, with how much it all felt as if nothing was changing at all, when it finally did, I wasn’t able to put my finger on the responsible factor to pleasing myself.


I tend to say to my costumers that the real true skill I think I have developed through my years of making instruments is not my technique, or my dexterity, or my knowledge, all of which I think I don’t hold very much of. I usually tell my curious visitors that I think of my ears as both the true obstacle and best achievement of my journey so far. Not that my ears have become developed to the point where I can now hear the barrier line between two frequency bands…let’s not be silly. My ears are as human as any other person’s, as a matter of fact, in the world I live, oh.. I see much better than mine in a regular basis. Rather, the skill I think I’ve acquired and highly value, is having learnt to ignore my ears when I knew they were susceptible, and trusting them when I thought it wasn’t right. It was much more of a process of learning how to be patient with what I hear, and how to be intelligent with the information I receive through them, than an actual improvement to my hearing organs — which as we know, in all cases, decay with time. It is this matured listening process and understanding of my ears that allowed me, both then and now, to be content and at peace with the many cymbal making ‘incognitae’ I have gathered —and will surely continue to gather just as likely as I might resolve.



I am still affected by many of the ideological and emotional challenges I have described here as being part of the past, though I have definitely become much better at dealing with them, and throughout it all, my bells, how I make them, and why I make them have morphed and adapted with me. To this day all of the above reasons still apply to my craft. I still think that the bell is one of, if not the most important part of the instrument when it comes to its color, timber, and articulation. I still assume as the purest form of my work, that which has a hand made bell. I still have a slight notion of pride and vanity when I make an instrument from bell to edge that I simply just don’t get when I make them with a pressed one. And I still try to push myself to move the metal in ways that might be considered to be difficult when bell raising —not that they are, they are actually very achievable, they just require a stubborn personality and time. 



But there’s one more I haven’t mentioned, being that as I tumbled downhill, or managed to crawl up the climb of my craft, I also developed a deep relationship for the act of making a bell, one that surpassed all the other reasons I’ve clung to so far: making a bell became a place of solace and routine, a space between meditation and sculpture, a slice of time where I put my anxieties to sleep, if only for a while. It became one of the few activities at my anvil I could approach with certainty. I grew attached to the slow process of setting it up, marking the metal, measuring sizes; to the many strategies involved in creating different shapes and strains, all beyond my ego, their sound or difficulty. I have foresight when I make a bell, and that gave me a sense of peace that no other process still does. Though, I won’t lie, there’s also many cases where I wish I hadn’t set up this motto from the get go, cause the added time and work it implies to make each bell by hand makes it impossible for me to be ‘lazy’ when I would very much like to. The occasions where I found myself in the need for celerity, thanks to multiple economic pressures, were most definitely aggravated by the necessity to make it all by hand. Regardless, the bell has shown to be such a good metaphor for cymbal making as a whole, such an important learning tool, and an emotionally balancing force within my practice, that I am glad my past self decided to drive me crazy by setting some intransigent and ostentatious rules when starting it all. 



I think the bell is both the birth place of a cymbal and where its “soul” is located. From the first hammer-print on that nascent statement, from the moment where you start to push the mound that will later become a bell, the changes on a blank’s sonic characteristics happen in such an abrupt and radical manner, you can clearly hear the cymbal erupting into life. A disc of metal that just hours a go was dull, discordant, fast, empty and cold, suddenly bristles with harmonics, breath, width and a flood of character and voice. Maybe the process of shaping the body of the instrument is but raising another bigger bell to, amongst other things, withhold, rein in and refine the otherwise unbound sonic energy of the original one. There’s something profound in that small piece of metal which sets the grounds for the rest to blossom. Be it a cymbal in progress or a finished one, the smallest of changes to the bell can result in a greater than expected effect to the overall sound of that instrument. And listen, I know all of this sounds a bit esoteric. If you know me, you know the tone of this paragraph so far is a bit too spiritual and bubbly for my usual rhetoric, but as it stands, it is a true representation of how I feel about the importance and role of the bell. From vintage cymbals’ emblematic sonic characteristics, to most modern Turkish produced cymbals, or any independent, take a look at their bells and you will find that much of that cymbal rests and depends on it, both literally and metaphorically. All in all, hopefully at this point it has become clearer, both for you as much as for me, why I started and why I’ll keep on making my bells by hand. Well, unless necessary by some other design constraint; I am not inflexible, and after all, it is of superb importance to understand that work-hardening, density and compression are all aspects that vary widely between pressed and hand made bells. In fact, the levels of each of those at which pressed bells exist are simply irreproducible by hand. So please, never assume a hand made bell as a better bell, they are certainly not. Each has its place and each has its value, which one ends up being preferable is all on the maker and on the listener. 



Lastly, if you are of the variety that came here expecting some technical knowledge, secrets and such, but found none of it and instead just got bothered to hell by this divan confessional of mine, well, sorry. First of all, I ain’t got them. I am no less clueless than I was three years a go. And in all honesty, even if I did, plastering them in “paper” was never going to be the case. As the waters rise, I try to make sure my tiny island retains all of its small little flowers, that they don’t wash away into the currents and bleed their colors into brown.. you know? Furthermore, it's a journey, and each individual’s path is slightly different. Plus, in my opinion, hiking ain't fun if you are pulling up behind another trekker; it is equally as fun as it is frightening when you get to make as much of the trail as the one you encounter.

Until the next one. 

MGQ