Do cymbals change?
In the realm of cymbal legends and lore, a tale as old as time, or about 5,000 years since the invention of the first cymbals, there has been the question of cymbals loosening up, becoming more tonally mature, or the less favorable term of being ‘broken-in’. At the very least most of the players I know, including myself, have experienced first hand that a newer or even just a long unplayed or rested cymbal can feel and sound a little stiff, lack nuance and full expression. In this cymbal smiths opinion newer cymbals made with modern manufacturing techniques are also abrasively bright and harsh when new. They just need to get some miles on them!
Like a Millennial gray living room starved of life while longing for saturated colors, patterns, and warmth; a new cymbal is yet to become what it will one day become. No, a few years of playing won’t radically transform a boring cymbal into something really special. But the cumulative hours of vibration from play settle in the ancient recipe of B20 bronze into something matured, maturing, and a little more stable right down to the molecules in the grain boundary of the bronze alloy that was once hot-rolled through a massive set of rollers and repeatedly reheated and re-rolled until the bronze had been squeezed into a complex alternating grain within the depths of the thin and flexible cymbal.
One cymbal I have in mind that I owned personally that gained such a transformation in time was a Sabian Manhattan ride. I special ordered it and was really excited for it. But the first few years it just wasn’t it. The day it came in to the shop I worked at I was ecstatic, but I was surprised that it lacked the tone I hoped for. I simply had expectations that were too advanced in it’s timeline. But I noticed over time it became a little more settled-in and more musical overall. It had actually improved after many hours of playing over the course of years. In the end, it was a cymbal that I really liked. It was then that I realized that the claims I had heard from others about old Zildjian cymbals that had aged like a fine wine, or the legendary sounds of some of the cymbals made in old Istanbul, weren’t just lore, there was a scientific, albeit subtle reality to the change that so many drummers had detected in their cymbals over time. There was something that deserved to be explored. And from that moment I began researching and building prototypes from what became Cymbal Vivo.
A vibratory stress relief device made specifically for cymbals to safely and gently simulate the accumulation of vibrations that a cymbal receives from being played over many years. The Cymbal Vivo works by directly mounting it on the cymbal stand in place of the wing nut where the cymbal is then mounted and secured. Then the ideal vibrational mode is found on the dial and the cymbal is left to gently resonate for days or even weeks allowing the player to experiment in gentle simulated play-in that would otherwise take years to accumulate. Finally, the missing piece has been found. Alloy, cymbal-smithing technique and patinas have long attempted to bring something of the cymbal past to the present. And while a flux capacitor is unavailable for the true cymbal connoisseur, Cymbal Vivo is ready for you to bring your cymbals into their tonal future, or perhaps, their past.
