an incoming freshman thought he knew how to play the crash cumbals and hit them straight together. One cybal completly bent back the wrong way. like, in playing position, they were looking like ( (

So they got inverted I think I have told this story before in another thread, but I know it is long gone and it is a good story.

Well I don't know the exact setting and when it happened, but when I marched cymbals at UNT one of the girls on the line told me about some trumpet player and his brilliant idea. Apparently he got the idea to take on of our 18" cymbals and toss is straight up in the air. Well, a interesting thing happened...this funny little thing called gravity took over and the cymbal came straight down and landed on the other side of the band and buried half way into the ground.

A girl a few years ago thought she knew how to play cymbals the same way PitmanofWRHS mentioned. So ever since then we called her the wind up monkey or just plain monkey. Because 1. She looked like she was one of those monkeys that play cymbals ya know? and 2. When playing mallets she uses her arms and looks like a monkey!!

But I had a little funny thing happen which i believe i told before. Christmas parade we were marching the drone and because of one reason or another I almost passed out and the cymbal handle came off my hand (small hands big handles which that is fixed now!!) and the cymbal rolled a couple feet in front of me. It was funny after I realized what happened!

I'm marching cyms for my third year at USC now. I've broken through at least 15 pairs of cymbals. There's this small issue of our drum instructor wanting a few of us to march chinas at games after we've been practicing on stadiums. Chinas are alot a lot thinner and flimsier than regular cyms, so they break along the edges very easily. And if you get enough strength and time in any pair of cymbals, they will break. I've gone through everything from concert cymbals, to Z-macs to most recently a pair of stadium mediums. Under enough wear, anything will break. There's really not much getting around it. Inverting is just about the same. The more you play cymbals and the harder you play them, the weaker they get. Over time, inverts will happen. Usually a cymbal will either invert or break, but not both. I played in a div 1 cymbal line over the summer and almost all of us managed to invert sabian hhx viennese or germanics. We all had good technique, so that wasn't the issue. That's all for now.

Before our game yesterday morning, I noticed a crack beginning to form in one my student's bell. I knew that was gonna be trouble, but I didn't think it was gonna die altogether as quickly as it did. This guy has pretty good technique, but the cymbal is pretty old and had been abused long before I got there. By the end of the game, the crack had lengthened and had another forming at a right angle to it. We did an exhibition that night at a HS contest, and by the end of the warmup there was another right-angle pair of cracks on the opposite side, mirror-imaging the first two. I had him not play any "bell-intensive" stuff like dings, so it wouldn't collapse during the performance. Fortunately, we have a back-up pair to get us through the season.

Man, broken cymbals suck, lol.

Theres this one guy by the nickname of "S.U." who is pretty much notorius for breaking the plates. Now, all we march with are 20 inch field Zildjians, medium-heavy. Needless to say, breaking, even "inverting" them ain't gonna be easy.

weeeeelllll....

He's been through at least four pairs, and its just his third year here. But fortunately, he's picking up my style of playing, which is just using more wrist than arm when playing. That way, the tempo won't get slowed down due to bringing your arms out to far or whatever and you can play louder. On top of that, the cymbal won't hit all wrong and stuff. (It might be a showband thing...I guess. I can elaborate more on our style of playing if y'all want me to, just let me know).

Anyway, I'd rather play with Zildjians. My experience with those "flexible" Sabians have been less than desireable, lol.

by the way, I'm pretty sure I've even seen this at least once or twice -----> )(

My senior year of highschool we had a cymbal break in a unique way. In our show that year we used an old fire engine siren that was hooked up to a car battery for it to work. Anyway when we were unloading the truck after a show one night the cymbal fell on top of the battery, connecting both terminals. It was an awsome light show and left a hole the size of the battery terminal right between the edge and the bell of the cymbal.

ProfeserM, that's a new one on me!

Heh this just happened today

I was talking to my Drum Captin about my cymbal straps starting to breaking off(not the leather ones. So I played with them for 2 more weeks till yesterday we got new ones. So we wherer marching to the stands from our buses and of course my right cymbal strap had to be lose and druming the middel of out first cadense my cymbal goes flying to the ground.