Sometime last night or tonight two small cracks appeared on the edge of one of my cymbals, an 18-inch A Zildjian Medium Thin Crash.

At some point I’ll try to post a picture here, although I don’t have a camera so don’t hold your breath.

I bought this cymbal at Houston Percussion Center back when it was on the North Loop just east of Yale during my sophomore year in college. I was playing drums for a (surprisingly entertaining) production of “Guys and Dolls” at Rice and I wanted a cymbal that could be used as either a crash or a ride, as the score included a lot of swing, which by the way I completely sucked at playing, so much so that I find it difficult to believe even now that the musical director later asked me to play drums in his band Gross National Product.

Anyhoo, this cymbal did not fulfill that function terribly well, as it is too light to serve as a ride in almost all cases, but it was a fantastic, if serendipitous, choice for rock: light enough to sound good quiet and thin enough to speak quickly, but big enough for eminent smashability. It was classically crisp and, at least by my standards, spectacularly loud.

Sheets of bronze only a few millimeters thick, cymbals are literally pounded into shape, and are designed to be struck forcefully with hardwood sticks. Every time a cymbal is played, the impact changes its sound imperceptibly, and cymbals age more quickly and more dramatically than any other musical instrument. For those reasons, although any individual instrument is idiosyncratic to some degree, a cymbal, I think, is among the most singular.

Tragically, the same factors that make cymbals unique also make them quite fragile. And unlike almost any other type of musical instrument, once they break, cymbals cannot be repaired, period. The second a crack develops, even an invisibly small one, a cymbal’s decay begins to shorten and its volume diminish. By the time a visible crack appears on a cymbal’s edge, its sound is a shadow of what it once was. The paradox of a cymbal is that the very process that creates its unique sonic signature is also capable of destroying it. I’ve never cracked a decent-quality cymbal that I bought brand new before, but any rock drummer worth his salt will tell you that’s a rare thing to be able to say after ten years on the instrument. In a very real sense, cymbals are made to be broken.

This cymbal has been with me for longer than any other piece of my current drumset. I’ve played it for an average of probably two hours a day, four days a week, for the past eight years. During that time it’s been on every recording I’ve made, with the exceptions of the Jana Hunter and Inoculist records I played on last year, and a few scattered live recordings. Drummers, unlike guitarists, almost never name their instruments- it would be like naming a a whole family that’s constantly adopting and disowning members- but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a personal relationship with them. I’m going to miss you, 18-inch A Zildjian Medium Thin Crash. You’ve been good to me, and I know I’ll never find another one quite like you.

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