TDJ-Issue-Three

Start to Finish
Matt had kindly agreed to demonstrate the process of
making a cymbal. Despite the rather perilous nature of his
earlier endeavours, the sheer amount of information Matt
can relay about metals and their properties is staggering.
He talks effortlessly in percentages, ratios and frequencies.
I cling to the dictaphone tightly, taking comfort in the
fact it’s capturing a wealth of information that’s passing
straight over my head.
“So, I start out with a bronze blank – I get these mainly
from foundries in Germany, Turkey and China. Bronze is
an alloy of copper and tin, and the tin percentage dictates
what potential sound you can get. There’re lots of different
types of bronze – typically I work with bronze that is
between five and twenty percent tin. Here, hold this.” He
passes me the blank, which is like a giant metal pancake.
It’s surprisingly heavy. “Around a third of that weight will
come off on the lathe,” Matt says, rooting around in a box
beneath the workbench before producing a tape measure.
“But before that, the first thing to do is find the middle,
and then punch a hole though.” He sits at the anvil, takes
a few measurements, then marks the centre of the blank
with a metal punch.
I ask Matt what type of bronze he’s using. “This is B20,” he
responds, “meaning it’s 20 per cent tin. It’ll make a nice,
dark old-school sounding cymbal. Roughly speaking, B8
or B15 will give you more of a bright and cutting rock
sound.” I relay a story to Matt about a B8 cymbal I once
owned that I’d been thoroughly disheartened with after
purchasing. From that day on, I always associated B8 with
inferior sounding cymbals.
Matt looks displeased. “No, that’s not the case at all. The
sound comes from the shape, thickness and how you
hammer it. B8 is often used for budget lines because you
can make an adequate cymbal quickly and simply with it.
Companies will often just press their cheaper lines in one
stamping, they don’t even need to be lathed, though there
will be fake lathing in the stamp. There’s only so much
quality that process can afford. But with hammering you
can use B8 to make a very good cymbal. I wouldn’t say it’s
inferior in any way. Paiste make a great line of B8 cymbals.
The old John Bonham cymbals were B8 Paistes – great at
cutting through walls of guitars. A thinner B20 cymbal
might not do that.”
“I read that you don’t work with B20?”
“It’s an alloy I chose not to work with from the beginning,
though I have started to use it more recently. Why? Because
there’s a handful of independent cymbal makers who all do
the same thing. They all buy Turkish or Chinese blanks
and hammer them. I wanted to do something different. I
didn’t have a lathe when I started anyway. There’s not a lot
you can do with B20 without a lathe, unless you want to
make Turk-style dry cymbals all the time.”
Matt turns his attention back to the cymbal resting on
his lap, and to the process he was describing before my
interjection. “If this was B8 or B15, I might soften up the
alloy with the burner and then cool it down quickly to
make the metal more workable for hammering. I can’t use
the burner on this one, it needs to be really hot - around
700 degrees - so you need a furnace if you want to soften
it.” He pulls out some earplugs from a drawer in the corner.
“You’ll need these.”
Sat with the blank resting partly on his legs and partly on
the metal anvil he takes out a hammer. “I’m just putting