TO CLEAN CYMBALS: JUST GRIN AND POLISH...

If there's one thing most drummers HATE to do, it's clean their cymbals.  There are actually two reasons why this is.  The first is obvious: It's a pain in the arsenal, especially if you have more than three or four, and some that are large in diameter.  Oddly shaped china cymbals are particularly difficult, not to mention cymbals with rivets.  Those are the most aggravating.

The other reason to not clean cymbals is to preserve the precious company logo.  While cymbal logos are not quite as valuable as drum badges, they are still very important to those drummers who want to show off exactly what brand of cymbals they use, and every effective cleaner I have ever used will definitely remove these markings.

Wanting to maintain the logo is totally understandable, but my desire to polish and keep things shiny outweighs my loyalty to any particular cymbal company, as well as my willingness to advertise their brand for free.  So you're darn right I will scrub that black logo right off of there in my efforts to make my brass instruments gleam, while I completely accept other drummers' insistence on keeping them intact and readable.  But when they try to convince me that dirty cymbals sound better, then I gotta call bull-poopy.  Just admit the truth.  Do you want to preserve the logo or are you just lazy?  It's one or the other.

So why is cymbal cleaning such a pain?  Because it is a lot of hard work, plain and simple.  You can watch YouTube videos about how soaking your cymbals in a bathtub full of Coca-Cola will do the job if you like.  Try to find shortcuts and please let me know about them as soon as possible.  From my experience,

however, it just takes a lot of time, patience and elbow grease.  Good old hand polishing is the tried and true method, and provides the most self-satisfaction in the end in my opinion.  To watch the slow transformation of a cymbal in the condition as pictured above to its revitalized state as shown here is a spectacular, mind-tingling experience, especially if the cleanser you use includes a lot of ammonia like mine does.

Woo-hoo!  I love the smell of metal polish in the morning!  Only 40 more cymbals to go.....*
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*Because "Hi-Hats" count as two.