Making It Sizzle

A few years ago I bought a drum kit.

Why?

Every boy needs a drum to bang on. At least that is my philosophy of life.

The back-story is I’ve always loved percussion. Those woodwinds and brass and strings in the orchestra were OK but those guys in the back put the punch in classical long hair music. They’d sit down or stand around most of the time but when they started banging on kettledrums and crashing cymbals everyone sat up and paid attention.

So I was in a guitar shop I often frequent and noticed a stack of drum shells. I asked the manager if he was selling drums too and he said they were his son’s and he was trying to get rid of them. We bartered a deal and now I was the proud owner of a drum kit w/ cymbals.

I’m not a trained musician but I can tinker away on guitar, bass, piano but I know nothing about drums. I’d admire the drummer in many rock bands keeping the beat together and even filled in for a song or two but I’m left handed and drum kits are set up differently than is natural for me to play. Ask Ringo.

So here was all these drum things and I had to assemble them and put them somewhere. One drum was missing a head and there were pieces that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Since I didn’t want to look foolish to my drummer friends, I went to YouTube. A couple hours of Googling and found I had to get a key, just like a car, to start my drumming experience with my new purchase.

So several trips to the local music shops and some hands on trail and error sessions and I had an assembled drum kit and it took up a rightly amount of space.

After many months of cleaning and clearing out I’d made some space upstairs that would be perfect for a studio. So all the drums and cymbals and stands and throne were carted upstairs and reassembled. I was ready to rock…. well not so fast.

I had lots of records and had seen a fair amount of bands and even played in a few to recognize the sound of cymbals. I’d seen a drummer or two with these things in their cymbals that made them ring and wanted to find out what that was.

Again the Internet helped me find what put the “sizzle” in the cymbal. In my research there were chains and necklaces lay on the cymbal but that seems very cluttered and cumbersome. Then I read something about rivets.

I went to the hardware store and even bought a box of rivet but couldn’t figure out how they could work on a cymbal. More research and digging and a few videos and I found the answer to my rivet conundrum.

Checking all the local music stores for ‘sizzle’ cymbals went nowhere and no one carried the rivets I was looking for. More research and digging and found the rivets were made in Turkey and could be ordered online. Still more researching and I found Bosphorus cymbals (seems many cymbals are made in Turkey) and ordered two packs of 8 ‘cymbal rivets’. At the same time I started getting worried.

From all the stories of cymbals I read, there was the horror of a cracked cymbal. I even watched how to drill a cymbal and put the rivets in but worried I’d do it wrong and kill the cymbal. Solution: buy another cymbal.

I matched the Paiste ride cymbal with another and marked the 3” deep from the edge for the holes to be drilled. I found the correct drill bit size to allow the rivet to bounce and purchased a metal drill bit the same size. Still there was that bugging image of me drilling into this piece of well-worked metal probably hammered by some Jihadist and it cracking under the pressure.

So the project sat ready to perform with the fear of failure.

Finally yesterday I took the bait and brought out the cymbal and drill and took the challenge. Place the drill bit in the correct marking and hit the power and pressed down. The drill bit started skipping back and forth as expected and just kept at it until the shavings started to pile up and the hole was done. No cracks so onto the next hole and the next hole and the next hole and the next hole and the next hole.

That went so well and I had another bag of rivets I pulled a china cymbal to repeat the process.

A ‘to-do’ now done I’ll reassemble the kit on its new rug to bang away through the winter months. And that is how you get things done…. with a sizzle.