Breaking The " Herd " Mentality.

Today I'd like to discuss the "herd" mentality that exsist in the percussion world. We all know drummers who are subject to such thinking. I have a freind who is stricken with that mentality. He is a fanatical devotee to certain brands. For instance he will not consider playing any cymbal That is not a ( No free promotion for anyone )let's just say brand X. Now the big Cymbal and Drum companies spend millions of dollars a year for advertizing. They also go to great legnth's to have an impressive roster of endorcers. So the herd mentality is created and maintained by them. They love guy's like my freind, who will purchase brand X cymbal's at any price. Maybe that's why they can charge what they do for cymbal's. The same goes for the big drum companies. It's essentially the same story. If more people would at least look at the alternatives and give them a chance maybe the big guys would lower their prices. Believe me as a Percussion retailor there's room for movement by the big drum & cymbal companies. They just don't do it because they don't have to.
When your a company like us ( Cymbals & Snares ) and you intentionally specialize in Alternative brands, and not carry any of the major brands. We automatically lose drummers who are like my freind. An entire segment of the drumming world is eliminated as potential customers. This means we need to work harder to attract those of you who are willing to think out of the box about brands. It takes time to get your company name out there and takes time to develope a reputation amongst drummers as the place to go for the " Other Name Brands". Slowly but surely we are getting there. We have been in business for 18 months name recognition and the products associated with it will take some time to accomplish. It's time we are willing to put in. We have recieved so many emails praising our approach to the percussion scene I know were onto something, I know were on the right track.
Still, I wish there were a way, an approach I could use on the brand loyal drummers to at least look at different brands. I believe the only way for them to even look at a different brand would be if there were some financial constraits put on them. Like a baby, buy a new house or a job loss. Even at that I know guys who would either just wait until the situations changes or look into purchasing used Cymbals. God forbid you consider something less expensive, or a different brand. Who ever said or where is it written that a good pair of Hi-hat's must cost around $300 and up ? It kinda makes you wonder about some drummer's you know. How easily they dismiss anything that isn't brand X.
There is hope on the horizon. With the proliferation of Cymbal and drum companies today and the ease these other companies can be accessed, I think the super brand loyal drummer is a declining group. Our email and the various drum forums are full of stories and posts that refrence the fact at one time they were strickly X brand drum's or Cymbal's until I found brand Z. As the major Drum and Cymbal companies face a slew of competitor's which will inevitably begin to nibble at there market share. The big guys have a few options in which to fight back. One is the most obvious a price cut. Make your Cymbal's more affordable again, make a smaller profit per unit which will probably be offset by larger sales. They also can buy their competitors and shut them down. I see the second option as not being very popular with the drumming community as a whole. This may back fire and cause many drummers to harbor Ill will towards the offending company. Drummers can be a funny lot sometimes. You never know exactly how the drumming community will act as a whole in any given situation.
Since Cymbals & Snares opened it's cyber door weve sold our "Other Name Brands" products to well over 1,000 customers. We have a perfect feedback of 100%. So there is obviously a good size market already in place for what we are doing. That's not to take away from our efforts to help develope this niche also. We have put a ton of man hours into everything from getting our business liscence and tax ID # to listing our product's. writing description's taking Video's working on our Store and our ancillary supporting sites such as You Tube and Blogger. The list goes on and on. Those of you who are willing to give the smaller guys a shot and have done business with us, already know how good and affordable some products can be. Those of you who are brand loyal we just ask you just take a look at we have to offer. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you see and hear. Until next time everyone....... T

Spring is Here !!

Hey Everyone It's T, President of Cymbals & Snares with our latest blog. Everytime I make a post I always says were gonna start to blog a few times a month. I haven't quite lived up to that promise but I assure you I'm working on it. Our Ebay store and our YOU TUBE channel really keep me busy. Plus I'm not gonna elaborate but things in my personal life have seen better days, None the less Blogger is a excellent platform for keeping Our customers, Newsletter subscribers, YT subscribers and freinds updated about the goings on of everyone's favorite Internet percussion site Cymbals & Snares.
We ended the first quarter of 2010 very strong. Our numbers were up signifigantly over 2009. However sales in the opening weeks of the second quarter were a little slower than we'd like, but as the weather starts to break we confident sales will pick up. We've signed up with a new vendor TMP inc. Our first products from them are " On Stage" drumsticks. These are an excellent line of stick's. Available in a variety of weights and sizes as well as wood types. Hickory select, Maple and North American Hickory these are very comprable to bigger name brand sticks but at C & S their far cheaper. Check them out. TMP also carries various brands of drum mic's. We are currently working with our sales rep to figure out which ones we will be stocking.
Our Website is comming. I know you've heard this before. This time we have signed a contract with a very reputable local web design/hosting company who will begin development of our own proprietary website. Were very excited about this. This will not effect our Ebay operation at all. It will join our Ebay store,our YOU TUBE site and of course our Blogger site in the C & S family of sites. We are building our company and Internet presence one site at a time. This will be a key addition and will be by the end of the year our flagship site. We will keep you updated as the site develops.
In a constant effort to bring you new product's we at C & S are constantly evaluating and talking to new companies. Look for a re-newed Taye drums presence by early summer as well as several new companies products C & S will be carrying. We don't wanna tip our hat just yet because until we sign the contract ain't nothin a done deal. Our main focus is to get spring sales moving and our number one priority over the next month to six weeks is to get our Website up and running. So we will be pretty busy. That's gonna be all for this Blog look for our next one sometime around the May 22nd. Thanks everyone T.

Well Hello Everyone It is T and I have returned to blow off the dust to my long neglected blog. This actually the first blog this year, after you here what's been going down you can perhaps forgive me.

Let's recap the last 2 months. Christmas was a record breaker for us. Our best month ever. Despite us not getting 2 major orders one from Wuhan the other from Silken until the 16th and 17th of December. We worked at a feverish pace to get every order we took in shipped out by Christmas. We cut it so close I was getting paniky. We had accepted thousands of dollars worth of orders on the promise from our vendors that the mother load of product was just a day or two away. With one company this went on from around Nov 28 th. Never again we learned a great lesson and will begin our Christmas ordering no later than Oct 1.

After Christmas Cymbals & Snares solidified our position as a major player for Silken cymbals, Recieveing well over 100 cymbals from them after the music trade show NAMM in January. Infact as of this writing we are the only authorized Silken dealer in the USA. A fact were very proud of. If you havent checked them out yet go to our website and peruse our extensive selection or you can go to our totally re-vamped You Tube channel http://www.youtube.com/ILDUCE61 and just check out the Videos. Were at close to 80 product Video's, plus video favorites we've downloaded and some our customer and freinds have sent in. It's really becoming a very interactive channel, and we love it. So shoot over there when you get a chance and subscribe we got room the more the merrier.

While your checking out either listings or Vid's on YT you may notice something . A change that was looong overdue. We laid out for a great new HI-def Video camera with digital audio. Compared to our old video presentation's it's like night and day. The one constant complaint we recieved especially about our listing Vid's was the poor quality of picture and sound. These were totally legit complaints. We had so rushed into getting set up we soon realized our video's were probably hurting us as much as helping. The one way and opportunity to impress a potential customers was being squandered for the lack of proper equipment.

Well we took corrective measures and things changed overnight. There was an instant positive reaction. All our video's are in high resolution accompanied with digital audio, the sound bytes are dead on accurate. We are very happy with this improvement. In order to better communicate with our customers and freinds we will be blogging atleast once a week, Like our You Tube channel our blog is an under utilized asset of our company. Not any longer.

The only drag thing that happened was Feb 17th I had an ulcer that burst. I also have a chronic intestinal infection which kicked into high gear from the ulcer's debris going through my intestines. On top of it my pancrease became infected it was a mess I was hospitalized 17 days. Since I do all the packing and correspondance our company ground to a halt. I was so hoping are stirling reputationwouldn't get affected. Most people were very understanding. Any issue's we had have been cleared up. I see the need to have someone else trained on the computer without a back up person we are very vulnerable. We are no longer the little Basement operation we once were, And that about wraps it up for this week kids. Until next time T.

My Set up

I always seem to ask the questions. I am forever the inquisitive one. Whenever I meet a fellow drummer I love to talk shop. All of you out there know exactly what I mean. Most of the times when you do meet a fellow drummer and a conversation ensue's you almost instantly bond. You think hey this guy's in "the Club" This happens more so now that I am a little older. When your younger in your teens and early twenties there's still that competetiveness we all posses, so sometimes things don't go as smooth as they do now.

The question I get asked most by people asides from business related questions is what do I play what is my set up like. Well this blog will be dedicated to my kit and set up. My drumkit is about 6 or 7 years old. It is a Mapex Mars Pro series the finish is Midnight Black almost a grey color with the wood grain showing. I like the color. When I purchased it Mapex was just switching over to the Pro M series of which my kit is the forerunner of. I got a very,very good price on my kit. You have to remember Mapex was not the household name it is today. At the time Mapex was almost a cultish drum company. People knew of them they were getting alot of good press, but I was still going out on a limb sorta speak. Foretunately everything worked out well.

When I first got my kit Mapex was still a novelty and whenever I did a gig Drummers would always ask me about my kit Most of the time it was the first Mapex most guys had ever seen. My Original kit was 6 pieces a 14x5 snare, 10x10 and a 12x12 mounted toms a 14x14 and a 16x16 suspended floor toms and a 20x18 kick drum. The kit comes with Mapex's suspended isolation mounting system. I really like the way all of my toms resonate. It came equiped with all the hardware A few cymbal stands double toms stand for the floor toms a snare stand a bass pedal a HH stand I mean everything. Mapex makes very nice hardware everything on my kit was double braced. Nice looking functional and sturdy, unlike a shell pack I didn't need to buy a thing to play. The quality hardware was a nice plus. A few years back I bought some shells that matched my kit off of ebay 3 to be extact. It was advertised with a 8x8 tom which I dearly wanted and still do. The guy couldn't measure his toms correctly I wound up with another 10x10 tom a 13x12 floor tom and a 18x18 floor tom.

They were'nt really what I wanted but I kept them anyway. I just tune the two 10x10's a little different from each other. It works pretty well. Last year I expanded again by adding a set of Cannon's tom toms to my set. They are 8x6 and 8x8 we sell these and I will tell you they were a great addition to my Kit. So there's my 11 piece kit for ya. The drums are fitted with Evans G2 coated batters and Evans G1 clear reso heads. The Kick drum has an Emad batter and a Black G1 ported reso. The coated G2's are excellent heads and I love them, there a two ply head which gives them a nice fat warm sound to them. The only thing I'm disapointed in is the Emad. It doesn't suck or anything, maybe I was expecting more especially the way guys in the forums talk about it. When it's time to change bass drum heads I'm going back to the Aquarian super kick II. I just like it better.

I use a double bass drum pedal It's a DW 5000 series pedal infact all of my pedals are DW's and they are all in the 5000 series. The Double kick is the 5002 to be exact. It's a great Pedal, smooth action ready to play right out of the box. My HH stand is also a 5000 DW with swivel legs and a removable third leg which is off to give me a little more room for the double kick pedals. Last but not least is my remote HH stand again the DW 5000 series. People have a tendency to critisize the remotes as sluggish and non responsive. I can honestly say none of that is true with mine I use an 8' cable so maybe that's the reason but it works like a charm. I think it's one of the best additions I made. I absolutely love playing with dual rides and dual Hat's.

As for my Cymbal array that really is the "voice" of a drummer. I have a hodge podge of brands Zildjians, Sabians, Wuhan's, Silken's, Diril's & a Meinl. People are so worried about the sonic contitnuity of the cymbal array they forget it's okay not to have cymbals to be perfectly note for note sonically mathced. I never worry if a cymbal will "fit" in with my set up. My Pie's are so diverse and so numerous anything at this point will match up. OK let's start the run down
Zildjian :
19" med Crash A
15" Thin Crash A
20" Ping ride Custom A
14" New Beat HH ( right side , secondary)
17" Med Crash A
8" splash Custom A
Sabian :
14" AAx Stage Hat's ( Main hats)
16" AA Thin crash
Silken:
20" Hansun ride
15" Vintage crash
10" Hansun splash
Diril:
16" Med ICE series
14" D series thin crash
Meinl:
16" MB20 Med/hvy crash
Wuhan :
8,10, & 12 S series splashes
16" S series thin crash
17" S series Med Crash
8 & 12" Taditional series splashes
8, 10 & 12" New Traditional series splashes
16" NT med crash
14" NT Thin crash
12" China
17" China

As you can see I like Cymbals Lots and lost of cymbals. I have 2 cymbals tree's with 3 cymbals on each. There is nothing like rideing up one Cymbal tree and down the other. On both rides plus a few i Have in reserve I use moongel. I think the stuff is great I use it on my $100 Wuhan , My $200 Silken and My $325 Zildjian. It's effectively cuts the wash and overtones and brings out really nice clear sticking. So there you have it that's my little baby. I've said it before and I'll say it again If I wouldn't use a product I won't sell it. Until Next Time. T.

History Of the Drumkit

I thought This blog we'd take a look at the History and development of the instrument we hold near and dear to our hearts. If your unfamiliar with the story it's actually pretty interesting to see how our instrument of choice came to be.
In the 1800's all theater was live. All broadway and vaudville shows had live bands. The percussion "section" was made up of several musicians playing different percussive instruments i.e. snare drum, bass drum, tom toms ( or chinese drums as they were also known) cymbal players and so on. In an early cost cutting move theater owners started to demand that the percussion section be reduced to one musician playing all the percussion parts together. This did not really become feasable until a man named William Ludwig look at the situation.
It was 1909 when William Ludwig invented the first workable bass drum pedal. He patented the idea and later that year the first bass drum pedals began to be manufactured. Intrestingly prior to the bass drum pedal's invention the bass drum player literally kick his drum. That's how the bass drum also became known as the kick drum a term we still use today. With the success of Ludwigs pedal the drummer could now be seated and an array of drums and cymbals could be set up around the drummer. Music also began to be written so a percussionist could play all the parts at once.
Early drum kits consisted of a bass drum, a snare drum a tom a few cymbals and a contraption table. mounted on the bass drum it was a table full of assorted percussion items that would be played during the show. Tambourines, Triangles, cowbells and thingsalong those lines would be on this table. Drum kits were begining to be reffered to as contraption kits. It was later shortened to trap kits and that is the origin of that term. During WWI and the roaring twenties the modern day drum kit truly began to take shape. There was just one thing left to modify and the truly modern drumkit was born.
Early drummers and drummers of this period kept time on the ride cymbal and on a piece of equipment called the "low boy". The LowBoy was essentially a high hat that was played on the floor. It had 2 cymbals the bottom one was stationary and the top one was moveable by a foot pedal standing only about 15 Inches from the floor and the cymbals were generally small 10-12 inches. It was a time keeping device meant to be heard by the drummer only. In the early to mid twenties drummers began to experiment around with the lowboy and began adding a tube to it raising the lowboy to a height that could be played with the sticks and still operated by the foot if one desired. In 1926 The First Hi-hat appeared in a drum catalog and the modern drumset as we know it was born.
During the 1930's and 1940's drum kits really began to resmble todays kits. Toms were added to the bass brum with mounting brackets floor toms with legs were positioned to the right or left of a drummer. Bass Drum sizes shrank from 26-28 inches to more modern 20, 22 & 24 inches. the bass drum pedals were improving so large drums were no longer needed for projection. What is generally considered a modern developement the double bass drum originally appeared as early as 1940. It enjoyed a brief moment of popularity as the swing era and big bands swept America. But by the early 50's be-bop and a new musical wave called rock-n-roll took over the airwaves and the double bass drum faded from popularity. Only to sit dormant and almost forgotten for over 30 years until ironically rock-n-roll revived it in the early 80's.
The double bass pedal was invented in 1972 and was manufactured by an Australian company Sleishman from 1972 until 1975 when manufacturing was discontinued due to a lack of sales. This was an Idea before it's time, today the double bass pedal is standard equipment amongst Metal drummers and is quite popular with rock and contemporary drummers also. Today's option for drummers is endless with the advent of electronic drums sound choices are endless for todays drummers. Double bass Pedals, remote Hi-Hats, elctronic triggers it all owes it's exsistence to 2 major inventions and innovations earlier in the 20th century. The development of the bass drum pedal and the Hi-hat.

Cymbals & Snares earns "Top Rated Seller" Status

First we hit power seller. Which is really just based on gross sales per month. I'm not exactly even sure what the minumum is for that designation. It does however let potential customers know that you are consistantly doing a fair amount of buisness. It let's them know your a serious Ebay store and operation, to some degree it gives your company some credibility and I'm sure makes some buyers more at easy in dealing with your company.
This month however Cymbals & Snares has joined the Ebay elite. We were designated a "Top rated seller " By Ebay. This is the highest designation Ebay can give a company. In essence it means that :
A) We consistently recieve the highest buyer ratings
B) We ship our products quickly
C) We have earned a track record of excellent service.
I and the entire staff at C&S thank our customers for rating and speaking so highly of us. When I started this business these were in essence some of our goals. It feels good to be recognised for your efforts. This will also boost the confidence of potential customers knowing they are dealing with a top rated outfit.
This just motivates us more to work even harder to unify our ancillary sites we've talked about into a seemless circle and makes us put more emphasis on finally getting our long overdue proprietary website up and running in addition to our Ebay store. We are certainly finishing 2009 with some momentum and look foward to making 2010 a truly "Breakout" year for us. Again we'd just like to thank everyone who has helped C&S become both a Power Seller and a Top Rated Seller. Without you our customers we wouldn't be any of this. Until next Time T.

Holiday Message from our President

Season's Greetings everyone. I cannot believe another holiday season is upon us. The economy is in the beginnings of it's long waited recovery. But still things are not that good on main street. Despite all that Cymbals & Snares experienced a year of solid growth. Last Christmas we went into the holiday season with about 25 product offerings, this year we've increased it by 5 fold to around 125 items. More goodies for you too choose from.

We could have more items but instead have chosen a more steady path to growth. We will continue to grow and add brands and products as long as our ability to keep the level of customer service you've come to expect from C & S remains the same. If you begin to sacrifice what has made you successful in the end we wind up being just another Internet drum shop. That's not gonna happen on my watch. We have just been awarded EBay's top seller award. each listing now will have a gold icon saying were a Top Seller and in our listing eBay lists the reasons for it. Consistent high marks from customers, consistently fast shipping. Were proud of that and we worked hard for it. We aim to keep it that way.

To help stretch your holiday dollars even farther C & S has eliminated shipping charges on all cymbal packs. Being these are our heaviest and most popular items it can add up to some real savings for some of you. We have not raised our prices to compensate for the cost to us. We have made the choice of simply doing with a little less income this season, and a way of saying thank you for patronizing our store before you even purchase anything.

Don't know what to get that special drummer in your life ? Cymbal & Snares introduces our personal shopper program. Simple email us with your name and telephone number and a sales rep will get back to you within 24 hrs to discuss gift ideas. The only thing we ask is that try to familiarize yourself at least a little bit with his/hers set up it will make picking out the perfect gift much easier. Try to see what type of cymbals they play ( the logo is usually on it) and what brand and how many drums he /she has. It will help us greatly. So don't worry about not getting the right thing. A friendly sales rep will help guide you to getting what your drummer needs on your budget. Not what we want to sell you. That's a C&S guarantee.

We have several more deliveries scheduled before Christmas. They will include products from Wuhan, Silken, Taye, TKO, cannon & attack so there's lots more on the way. Now take a deep breath and relax your holiday drum shopping is in good hands.

As President I and the entire staff at Cymbals & Snares would like to thank all of you who patronized our site this year. We look forward to an even bigger 2010. We hope you have a great thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa or a Merry festivus for the rest of us no matter what your beliefs are or wehter you have any beliefs at all have and enjoyable holiday. Thank you

Tony Patrizzio
President
Cymbals & Snares