The 4 Main Ingredients of a Great Cymbal Crash

Hello Everyone!

I hope you had a great end of your summer and are not going too crazy with the start of fall. At least here in Philly we are starting to get some cooler weather, which is beyond exciting.

This is my second video exploring the world of orchestral percussion. After making my first about the triangle, the logical next step was cymbals; which are my favorite percussion instruments. If you have not already checked out the one about the triangle, scroll down and have a look. There are many fine details that go into playing a great cymbal crash, and it takes a life time for a percussionist to master them. Focusing on 4 of these details will hopefully help anyone understand what goes into making a great sound out of hitting 2 metal plates together.

This video is a bit longer than my previous one, and my intention was to (subtly) split the video into 2 halves. The first half should provide someone who is interested in a general overview of the cymbals with enough information to “get it”. The second half provides a few specific musical examples for those who want to dig in further or are a budding percussionist themselves. I opted for this form of presentation, rather than creating a “Part 1 & 2”, so that I would have all of the information about cymbals in one place. My goal was to make the entire (16 minute) video face-paced enough that it would be of interest to a wide variety of experience levels; including non-musicians.

Thanks for checking out my videos and if you have any comments or questions I would be very glad to hear them! If you liked this video I would also greatly appreciate it if you liked, commented, and/or subscribed to this video and my channel on YouTube. Stay tuned for some more videos coming your way which will hopefully be released in the next few weeks.

-Dave