Tomasz “Krzyżyk” Krzyżaniak presents Zildjian S family cymbals

Just a few days ago, Ada Music – the official Zildjian distributor in Poland – sent us a bunch of brand new cymbals from the Zildjian S family, which is the latest addition to the company’s catalogue.

Who better to have a bash on them, if not Tomasz “Krzyżyk” Krzyżaniak – the freshly Zildjian roster-enlisted drummer, who plays with the most popular heavy rock act on the Polish scene called LUXTORPEDA? Nobody. That is exactly why he’s the one who’s going to do the job.

After all, we are dealing with cymbals made from the B12 alloy, which the manufacturer advertises as bright, expressive cymbals built with a balanced frequency response thus perfectly fit to compete for band with heavily distorted guitars fed through an amp with the gain knob set at “Are you nuts???”. This, however, doesn’t necassarily have to apply to volume, which we will discuss later.

Obviously, we didn’t inflict such sonic “attractions” on our viewers. Tomek and ourselves made a collective decision to let the cymbals sing on their own, accompanied only by the other elements of the drum kit. The artist performed three tunes from the Luxtorpeda catalogue while changing the crash and ride cymbals for each of them. Those are:

For ‘Niezalogowany’ – Zildjian S 22″ Medium Ride, Zildjian S 20″ Medium Thin Crash and Zildjian S 18″ Medium Thin Crash
For ‘Nieobecny nieznajomy’ – Zildjian S 22″ Rock Ride, Zildjian S 18″ Trash Crash and Zildjian S 18″ Rock Crash
For ‘Siódme’ – Zildjian S 20″ Medium Ride, Zildjian S 18″ Medium Thin Crash, Zildjian S 16″ Medium Thin Crash.

The cymbals used on all of the songs are Zildjian S 14″ Mastersound Hi-Hats and Zildjian S 18″ China.

The obvious observations resulting from the basic rules of physics and acoustics include:

Medium Thin crashes are physically softer when playing compared to their Rock brothers
The Rock Ride is more pingy than the Medium Ride
Smaller diameter crashes are brighter and of shorter decay than the bigger ones, e.g. 20″.

In establishing the relation between Zildjian S and their older cousins, such as Zildjian A, K, Z and A Custom, we have to say the S family is the brightest of them all, with the largest amount of high overtones coming into the picture (even larger that in the case of A Custom cymbals). However, they are not as loud as A Customs or Z3s. A positive feature of the Zildjian S cymbals is that most of the unpleasant, high overtones, which are audible live in the room, disappear when filtered by studio microphones.

In addition to that, taking into account all the above-mentioned characteristics together with the relationship between quality and price, we are dealing with cymbals which are well worthy of consumer attention and can be classified as somewhere between semi-pro and pro.

The Zildjian S cymbal family will appeal, first and foremost, to rock and metal drummers and should pose a threat to such well-established competitors as Paiste Alpha.

See and hear for yourselves. Here is Tomasz ‘Krzyżyk’ Krzyżaniak and the Zildjian S cymbal family.