Transcript for the video "How I Made My Drumkit, Part3"

Note: this page includes very few pictures, watch the video for the complete story!

Hi my name is Marcel and I would like to share with you how I made my electronic drumkit and how you could be making your own electronic drum kit. This is part 3 of a 10 part series and in this video I would like to show you how to make electronic cymbals. Making cymbals is easy, but can be tricky. If you don’t make them strong enough, you might crash your cymbals. I will explain what problems I encountered and how I solved them. In the last part of this video I will show you some weird cymbals. Let’s go to the workbench.

To make a cymbal, you basically need a plate of some kind of material, drill a hole in the middle and attach the trigger underneath. (A cup in the middle is obviously optional). In part 2 I showed you how to make a trigger, so if you do not know how to make a trigger, watch part 2 first. In this video I will show you how to make a single zone cymbal. I will show you how I attach the trigger, what materials to use for the cymbal, what rubber to use to soften the cymbals edge and I will show you how I mount my cymbals.

First topic is how to attach the trigger to the cymbal. To attach the piezo to the plate, you could use glue. The risk however, is that when it is too tightly fixed the signal could be too strong. If you use thick doublesided tape, the signal may be too soft. So I prefer the intermediate solution: I use thin doublesided tape. I recommend good quality tape, and I recommend that you secure the cable using duck tape, so the weight of the cable does not pull the piezo off.

Now what material to use for the plate? You can basically use any material you like, in any size and any shape. You could make a cymbal out of wood, or you could use plastic. Be aware though, soms plastics break easily. For instance acrylate, that crasks too easily and it could even be quite dangerous to use that for a cymbal. Personally, I have made lots cymbals out of PVC plate, 3 or 4 or 5 mm thick. The nice thing about PVC is that it is flexible, that makes it easy to work with and it is not likely to break.

I guess most drummers want a cymbal that looks and bounces like a regular cymbal. If you want that, you might want to try thinner plastic plates, or material that is even more flexible than PVC. In the past year I have tested a very flexible type of plastic. I don’t know the name of the plastic, I bought them as readymade DIY cymbals. As you can see they have a cup in the middle. The cymbals had the exact look and bounce I was looking for. So for a while, I was very happy with these cymbals.

However, I play mostly rock music. These cymbals probably work fine for playing jazz but playing rock music means that you play crash cymbals on the side very often and very hard. So within a few weeks these things cracked, just around the cup. But being a builder, I did not give up. I made a series of adjustments. The first thing I did was that I bought a few plastic plates without a cup, hoping they would not crack. But after a few weeks I got cracks in the new cymbals as well. So the conclusion for me was that this material is just not strong enough for me.

Another thing I learned was that the hole in the middle wore out because of the contact with the metal screwthread. The small rubber pieces I got with the cymbals, they tore easily and the hole got bigger each hit. First I tried to fix it by glueing two 3cm metal rings around the hole in the middle. Believe it or not, during a gig one cymbal cracked around the rings, leaving a 3 cm big hole. The obvious solution for this problem was to put little pieces of hose on the screwthread, so the plastic does not touch the metal screwthread. Since then the holes of my cymbals are not wearing out anymore.

Another one of my mistakes you can learn from, was that I glued the jack connector to the bottom of the plate. I did that for visual reasons. It was a bad idea. It cracked there as well, as you can see.

So after that I made cymbals with longer cables and now I tape the connectors to the rack. I haven’t had any problems since. Looks are important, reliability is more important to me. So I tape the connectors, at my side of the pipe.

Well after all these experiences I decided to go back to my trusted material. My current 10”cymbals are made from black PVC and they are 3mm thick. To keep the visual appearance, I cut the cups off the old cymbals and I attached them on top of the new cymbals, using duck tape. The cups stay on perfectly. it might not look very professional, but remember: I play in a rock band and I like my drumkit and my podium to look a bit 'old'.

Because PVC is less flexible compared to the thin material I used before, I made the hole in the cymbal a little wider. This enables the cymbal to bounce more. On top I use a metal ring and a self-locking nut to keep it flying off like a helicopter.

Hitting these cymbals on the side, makes quite a loud acoustic sound. To eliminate that, I have two solutions. The cheapest way is to use transparent PVC hose (8-12mm). You can cut them using a sharp knife. When you're cutting it, you need to make sure you cut it in a straight line. Otherwise you will not be able to wrap it around the edge of the cymbal. To make sure you do not cut yourself, I recommend you fix it like this and do only a few inches a time. Do not pull towards your hand, that is extremely dangerous!

Another way to soften the cymbal at the edge, is to use this rubber profile. When you look at it from the side, you can see it is an H- profile. For the Dutch people watching this, I got this at RubberMagazijn.nl, the number is 21202200.

If you want to wrap this around a plate, you have to pull it quite hard, to avoid wrinkles. You have to add superglue to keep it together. So put on some gloves, glue the first part on both sides, and alternate putting glue on and it pulling the rubber round the plate. At the end, put a clamp on it and leave it for a few minutes. Doing it as fast as I am now, might not give you the best result. But again: I play in a rock band and I like my drumkit and my podium to look a bit 'old'. So these drops look fine to me.

Obviously there is a difference in looks between these two solutions, the black rubber looks better to me. But there is also a difference in sensitivity. The rubber is softer than PVC, so better suitable for heavy hitters.

So this is how I made the 6 cymbals that I use in my current drumkit. I use them as crash or splash cymbals, I usually use a drumpad to play ride and hi-hat sounds because that gives a better bounce when you play them so it is easier to play eigth and sixteenth notes. The 5 smaller cymbals, 6” in size, are used as pads and control pads. I play those like drumpads, so they do not need rubber on the edges, but on top. To learn what rubber as I use on top, watch the next video, part 4. If you want to know how I mount my cymbals, watch part 6 in which I will show you how I built my rack.

None of these cymbals have chockable rims and none have multiple zones. I just use a large amount of pads, because it is easier. If you want to create cymbals or pads with multiple zones, you will learn that it is a bit more difficult because you need to prevent crosstalk. I will explain more about crosstalk in the next video.

Before I wrap the cymbal topic up, I like to try to inspire you to get creative. As I explained, you can literally use any material and make cymbals in any shape. An example of something in an entirely different shape is this, what I call a Tube. Here is a small one, that is made of PVC pipe. The piezo is on one end, the screwthread is on the other.

Here is a big one... a different design.

One other way is to attach triggers to common things and use them as crash cymbals. For instance you can put a trigger in a plastic helmet... or in a tennis racket...

Or a plastic hubcap (Dutch: wieldop). You might think that I am joking now, but I'm not. You could really use 2 of these to use as crash cymbals on your drumkit and it might look awesome. At the very least it would make your drumkit unique!

If you are really into funny things, you could also add triggers to small toy instruments. I have added triggers to this toy drumkit, to this toy piano and... well I’m sorry I did not get around to adding them to this toy guitar. But I still could if I wanted a complete set of instruments for a whole band. This saxophone here looks like a toy, but it actually has MIDI built within. So you could play bombastic drumsounds with it.

I also have two pairs of drumsticks in my collection, the small pair has cheap sounds in it and it runs on batteries. That is and remained to be a toy. The large pair however, is selfmade from a pair of broomsticks. I glued piezo’s in the handles and it can trigger my drummodule. I hope these things ‘trigger’ your imagination?

So in this video I explained how I make cymbals. I have explained that although cymbals are really easy to make, you need to make sure they are tough enough for your playing style. If you want to build your own cymbals, I hope you have as much fun building them as you will have playing them because they might break occasionally if you hit them hard. In the next video, I will show you how to make electronic drumpads! Thanks for watching!

Click here for the transcript of the next video in this series