Cymbal angles?

STXBob

Gold Member
No, not tom angles. There's already a thread for that.

Like many of us, I sometimes fall down "cool drum video" rabbit holes on Youtube. I twigged to something yesterday: People are starting to angle their stuff away from them. Anike Nilles has it in this video, for example. I saw an ad in DRUM! magazine featuring Keith Carlock that shows floor toms and side snare tilted away.

I know things go through trend phases. In the 80s everything was tilted toward you. The Oughties saw a shift back to everything being flat.

Is what I'm seeing becoming a trend? Was it a trend and I missed it? Or is there a serious reason for it that I can't comprehend?
 
That Anika Nilles cymbal setup is interesting. The edges of the crashes are pretty much at the normal height. But sloping away makes the cymbal sit much lower. Good for visuals - the audience can see more of the drummer, and it looks kind of alternative.
But I wonder if hitting the cymbals on such a steep angle will damage them more easily? Also, I play my crashes on the bow and the bell at times, which would be pretty difficult with the cymbal sloping away. So I see it would make it easier to belt the crashes hard on the edge, but difficult to do anything else.

I wonder if it will become the next fashion.
I wonder how long until I start seeing kids at my school setting up this way.
 
Anika's is definitely a trend/look thing. Love her, but that's just going to give you the same abuse concerns as higher, flat cymbals. At the height of those two left crashes, flat is the optimal position. Her right-side stack, additionally, is quite far up – however I could understand about half that angle as I've found that a bit of tilt up on cymbals as low as that is necessary to keep your stick hitting the edge instead of the bow. For example, in the below pic of one of my setups:

11328500_899533836769882_2111132470_n.jpg


You can see the stack is tilted towards me a bit. Because it's so low, I have to avoid hitting the hoop of my floor tom with my hand when I play it, so tilting it up brings the edge up and prevents me from just hitting the bow with the tip of my stick and making a different sound than what I want. However, all the other cymbals are at close-to-optimal angles so that my stick will have the smallest angle possible with the edge when I hit them, so I get the least amount of force going straight into the edge and the most force perpendicular to the axis of rotation (the mounting point). That's a lot of jargon to say that "it seems right". Also, obviously the ride can be tilted a little more to provide easier access to the bow since that's its main purpose.

Now, as for the Daru Jones drums away from you thing... hell if I know.
 
I'm not sure about Keith Carlock, but most trad grip players have the snare angled away from them... at least I always have.

As for cymbals, I don't understand why you would angle it away from you, it seems like that would limit the parts of the cymbla that were immediately available to you. I like to get different tones out of different parts of the cymbal; if it's angled like that you can only crash on it...
 
No, not tom angles. There's already a thread for that.

Like many of us, I sometimes fall down "cool drum video" rabbit holes on Youtube. I twigged to something yesterday: People are starting to angle their stuff away from them. Anike Nilles has it in this video, for example. I saw an ad in DRUM! magazine featuring Keith Carlock that shows floor toms and side snare tilted away.

I know things go through trend phases. In the 80s everything was tilted toward you. The Oughties saw a shift back to everything being flat.

Is what I'm seeing becoming a trend? Was it a trend and I missed it? Or is there a serious reason for it that I can't comprehend?

People do weird stuff to their drums. As far as trends, I think some stuff is really cool. Others I think is sort of silly.

I think some drummers try to do something different just to be different and get people talking about them. I also have the sneaky suspicion that some of the crazy tom angles and cymbal angles some of the pros use are more influenced by stage producers.

If the songs are simple to play, you can do whatever. However, pictures like this give me nightmares:

GarrettGoodwin02.jpg
 
The thought was brought home to me when I looked at a Youtube vid posted in the "Your Playing" forum here. It's spreading, clearly.

I understand the tilting of a snare drum when playing traditional grip. I've done it, too.

It's like they prefer to dig in to the edge of the cymbal, which breaks what I've always known as "good technique." I've been playing long enough that when I screw up and dig into the edge it sounds wrong.

I guess we'll see what happens.
 
When you look at a drum kit you have a mental picture of how the sticks will land and how your body would interact with it but looks can be deceiving too.

Since buying a kit with a small bass drum for example, I can set the rack tom as low as I want but I find it's ergonomically better to have it higher, my hands just like it more when I reach for it.

Chris Coleman sets his cymbals and toms angled away from him (angled forward), his rationale is that because he has the cymbals low, he wants to hit them at the same angle as he would if they were up high, which only means he would have them sitting fairly flat if they were up high.
 
I keep my cymbals level as my avi shows. When you look at my kit from the front, the cymbals look like they are angled towards the audience slightly. But when I'm sitting at the kit, they look flat to me.

The reason I keep mine flat is the edge. I want the edge available to me. It's the only consistent way I know to crash cymbals. I don't have to strike as hard, and I can control it easily with ready access to the edge. I know just how hard to hit it on the edge to get the effect I want.

Plus I think the cymbal decays better when it's flat. No keyholing possible either. The look better flat to me as well.
 
The first drummer I saw do it was Johnny Clegg's drummer. I tried it. It lets you get the cymbals quite low yet still able to crash them with the stick at an angle similar to what you would get if the cymbal were higher at a more "normal" angle.

There was nothing magic about it, to me. I don't care a lot if the audience can see me. It works fine, but so do more traditional setups.

EDIT - one note. If you are close-micing the toms, it might work better to have the cymbals higher to prevent bleed. All depends on your mic setup, I suppose.
 
All my cymbals angle just a slight bit towards me. Never flat, never away from me. Same thing with drums. Always a slight angle towards me. I don't even think I keep my snare flat. Just a slight tilt on it.

This whole "angle everything away", "make everything extremely flat", "angle everything extremely towards you" are just fads. Its about the looks and not about the ergonomics of playing. I don't buy in to it.
 
I'm sure it's just to keep us guessing on DW forums, and for no other reason.

They can do whatever and more power to them. I am pretty confident that it would not work for me and my playing style, so I don't plan on doing it any time soon.
 
Now I feel bad...I have a hard enough time just playing the drums and sounding remotely acceptable to what song is being played to worry with how the tilt looks and the coolness factor.

Although watching the Anika Nilles video was fun. She's def in the "cool" category. Also the "hot" category. Wait, can a female drummer be both hot and cool?
 
You have to decide on your ergonomic eficiencies all by yourself.

There's no proof that having them tilted away will make you hit them poorly unless you have poor proprioception. Joint angle replication is easy to learn and if you want to use the same wrist angle that you hit the drum with, angling the cymbal away will achieve that.

Most people might find it awkward, but the angle doesn't make it bad for the cymbal.
I don't play like that, but I might rethink my settings if I put my mind to it.
 
Now I feel bad...I have a hard enough time just playing the drums and sounding remotely acceptable to what song is being played to worry with how the tilt looks and the coolness factor.

Although watching the Anika Nilles video was fun. She's def in the "cool" category. Also the "hot" category. Wait, can a female drummer be both hot and cool?

They can definitely be in the "exempt from dudes commenting on their looks" category.

The cymbals away thing does look interesting, despite its propensity for cymbal damage.
 
They can definitely be in the "exempt from dudes commenting on their looks" category.

The cymbals away thing does look interesting, despite its propensity for cymbal damage.

I honestly don't think there is any propensity for cymbal damage, no more than any "normal" angle. When I played them that way, I didn't find myself striking them any harder or with any different angle of attack than if the cymbals were higher up and flat or angled more conventionally. I just didn't have to raise my arm to hit them.
 
It's not about the velocity. When we crash a cymbal with a stick, the stick's shaft makes an angle with with the cymbal's edge and delivers a force, right? Using trigonometry we can separate that force into an X and Y force – Y being up & down perpendicular to the cymbal's edge, and X being parallel to the edge. We want to minimize the X force because sending force directly into the cymbal like that creates an uncharacteristic sound and doesn't feel good for us or the cymbal. Hence what I talk about when I say you want the angle between your stick and the cymbal's edge to be as small as possible.

Now, do the forces associated with Anika's angles really impart significant force into the cymbal, and does that force even contribute meaningfully to a cymbal's likeliness of cracking? I have no idea, but y'know, I don't really care to find out.
 
I keep my cymbals level as my avi shows. When you look at my kit from the front, the cymbals look like they are angled towards the audience slightly. But when I'm sitting at the kit, they look flat to me.

The reason I keep mine flat is the edge. I want the edge available to me. It's the only consistent way I know to crash cymbals. I don't have to strike as hard, and I can control it easily with ready access to the edge. I know just how hard to hit it on the edge to get the effect I want.

Plus I think the cymbal decays better when it's flat. No keyholing possible either. The look better flat to me as well.

Why is this? I used to have my cymbals a bit higher but angled towards me. Now I have them lower but flat. BUT when I look at them from the front of the kit, they look like they're angled towards the audience. It's MADDENING!
 
Lately I've been mounting my ride a bit higher and flatter than I have before. Not sure why. It just feels right to me for some reason. OT, but I've been doing the same with my snare drum. Something in my technique is evolving that way.
 
I like them flatter too-because less likely to keyhole one, and then too I like the edge to hit and some times I'll hit one underneath as well as on top. But I guess it's just a preference.
 
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