[UC-ODDMUSIC] Vintage Handmade Cymbals

[Rob Scott]

I have made a website, Cymbal Stamp
Timelines<http://www.robscott.net/cymbals/>,
which can be used to date cymbals from the early days of the modern drum
set.*

Before cymbals were silkscreened with black letters, they were engraved with
a stamp. See:

[image: stamp1-300x300.jpg]

These can be used to track down the date that an individual cymbal was made.
This is important for people who use old cymbals, because different decades
of the 20th century generated different cymbal sound characteristics. Early
cymbals were hand hammered, and thus each cymbal is unique in its sound.
Thus, if one wants to find a good bop ride, or a choke spash, it is helpful
to know whether they cymbal in question is a 1950s K Zildjian, or a 1930s A.


Most non-drummers will find this information arcane. Please feel free to
share this website with any drummers you know. It is a work in progress and
there are some glaring deficiencies, notably the absence of Swiss cymbals
(which quickly became machine-made, but were briefly hammered).

Rob

_______________________
*The 20th century was the time when the art of cymbal-making spread around
the globe. In the beginning of the century, there were really two main
sources of orchestral quality bronze cymbals: China and Constantinople (then
in the Ottoman Empire, where an Armenian family produced them). Of course,
there were cymbals in the Americas, in Africa, India, Indonesia (think
gamelan) etc. Those cymbals didn't really enter the modern music world of
suspended cymbals played with sticks, choked, hi-hats, crashes, rides,
swish, etc. My interest in this project is the archaeology of the drum set
cymbal.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/uc-oddmusic/attachments/20101209/c25efad9/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 31207 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/uc-oddmusic/attachments/20101209/c25efad9/attachment-0001.jpe>