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 as well 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 shelves 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. Once again, if you follow my work, another thing you are probably aware of is the multiple posts about bells, often accompanied by a plethora of 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 that I may have a ‘small’ infatuation with the bells in my instruments, and 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, extra risks and irregularities. 



Though, important disclaimer: 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, let me explain. 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 ever done in my workshop, 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 how I got there. 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 shape every blank it in its entirety if I want to be able to feel satisfied with myself while looking at their finished result. 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 excruciatingly detailed work to shape, build, refine, sand, taper, glue, etc the resonant body on one of his pieces, but then, just going ahead and buying a pre-made neck of sorts, sticking it there and calling it a day... it would cheapen his work, make it impersonal. And I know that analogy is fraught and silly. I know the concept of craft ownership via severe absolutism doesn’t fly. 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 this was never about the audience, it was about me, and to me, to my impossibly intractable vision, bell making was an inescapable room I had built to trap myself inside it; if I wanted to make cymbals and be proud of my results, I had to fully make all of them, those were the rules of my game.

Throughout my two years at the cymbal factory where I started, all bells were pressed into shape. So, with very little experience on the matter, during my first year as an independent, I was shaping my bells 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. This 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 corner where the secret to a successful cymbal laid yet to be grasped. I was constantly tweaking and mixing up things in every other area of the body of my cymbals. 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. This naturally led me to look at the bell as the only possible remaining spot of the instrument I hadn’t properly played with 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. My cymbals probably sounded fine, but I was superimposing my poorly delineated desires above the physical realities I had in front of me. 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’. Most of my gripes against my work were of my own construction. They were, and still are, in part, my superiority complex manifesting itself. Yet, all of the headbutts, anxieties, depressions, inner fights and perceived failures 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 to this day still I fall short of my standards more often than not.

You must understand that I needed a level of clarity and functionality from my instruments that had to be pair to its aesthetic beauty. 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, I’ve grown to be more flexible, understanding and patient with my ears. But at the time frame I am describing in this piece, that wasn’t the case entirely, so, please bare that in mind. I’m writing with the intention of leaving this thoughts on the paper, so I am not holding anything, as obnoxious and overly personal as that might occasionally sound.



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 physical challenges in raising a bell that acted as obstacles towards the goal I had in mind. 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 (and I messed it up, A LOT). I wanted to be better at physically molding the small details that I thought mattered, less for their sonic outcome at this point than how satisfactory it felt: 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 much control over material density I had, etc. Their physicality and feasibility had become as important to me as their possible effect on the overall aural landscape of a cymbal. 

Now, 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.


Sometimes while in conversation with my costumers, the topic of craft skills, control, knowledge and such comes up. I am by all means a person on his formative and initial years, 5 years might sound like a lot to some, but it really is just the beginning. So, when that happens, I share with them my perspective, that being: the real true skill I think I have developed in my so far short career as an instrument maker is not my technique, or my dexterity, or my knowledge —all of which I think I don’t hold very much of that isn’t intuitive. 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 super developed or able to capture sound to a higher degree...not at all. My ears are as human as any other person’s. As a matter of fact, in the world I live in, surrounded by absurd musicians, I am in constant contact with ears that far surpass mine in their raw capacity to hear and internalize either musical or aural information. 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’ input to which I give responsibility, both then and now, for the capacity to be content and at peace with my results and 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 challenges I have described here as being part of the past, though, I have definitely become much better at dealing with them. Throughout it all, my bells, how I make them, and why I make them have morphed, adapted with me while simultaneously anchoring 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 to a certain degree, articulation. I still perceive handmade bell cymbals as the purest form of my work. 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 to what I think might be its “limits” while raising a bell. But there’s one more reason, and a much more important one I haven’t mentioned yet. One that was born out of the combination of all of the above, and the one that has kept me at it: 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. And to me, that was precious.

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 realized I have foresight when I make a bell, and that gave me a sense of peace that no other process does still to this day. Within the somewhat amorphous and semi-unpredictable process of making a cymbal, bell making felt safe, it felt predictable. Though, there’s also many cases where I wish I hadn’t set up this bell-making 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. There’s been occasions where I found myself in the need for celerity, thanks to multiple economic pressures, and they 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 at times drive me crazy, and at others heal me by setting some intransigent and ostentatious rules when starting this whole project. 



-o-

I think the bell is the birth place of a cymbal, it is where its “soul” lays. 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, a flood of character and voice. 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.
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 physically 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, after probably boring you to hell with this lengthy divan confessional of mine comes the big reveal, right? The big ‘How’s’ and ‘What’s’. How do I make a bell? What are the steps, the hammers I use? What is the order of affairs, what anvil when? Well, if that was what you hoped to encounter here, I apologize. That’s not part of my personality. I enjoy thoroughly conversing about the ideas behind cymbal-making, about how it feels, the struggles and achievements, about the personal philosophies of the maker, about sound, etc. But I’m not really keen on sharing my personal approaches in a technical manner. First of all, heck if I know how right or wrong I am about anything I do. I am no less clueless than I was three years a go, I am just, somewhat more secure about myself. Furthermore, it's a journey, and each individual’s path is slightly different. 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