Finger Cymbal Lessons with Sahira | Tick Tick Thud… Creating the Tick two ways

In our quest for most robust and delicious zilling, we are always looking for new and unique sounds to add to our arsenal. Whether you are in the earlier stages of your zill adventure, or are a long-time player looking to expand your tool belt, using more than one sound on your cymbals is a huge ingredient to more expressive and satisfying zill work.

Within my practice, I have four core sounds:
The Basic – A hard attack of finger down to thumb zill that opens into a ring.
The Clack – A muffled chomp of both zills together.
The Ring – An edge to edge connection of the zillls that results in a clear ring.
The Tick – A muffled stroke using one zill perpendicular to the other.

You can learn them here: https://youtu.be/5blbtE5VVAI

(There are lots more great sounds where these came from… I consider these four to be the foundation of my zill toolkit.)

For years I have been teaching that fourth sound – the Tick – in a specific way : with the middle finger cymbal creating a little “hat” for the thumb cymbal and the two striking perfectly perpendicularly, with the rim of the thumb cymbal aiming towards the center of the other cymbals’ inner bell. This worked well for me.

Until it didn’t.

I recently bought a fabulous set of zills (the large Saroyan Grecians in silver) and discovered to my surprise that more than half of all my attempted Ticks came out more like Thuds.

What the heck?

This led me to do some investigation and this is what I discovered. If you’ve ever found yourself in a thuddy rut while trying to create a clean Tick sound, or are looking to find a way to create the Tick more quickly for complex zill patterns, you will definitely want to check this out.

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Are you able to create the Tick sounds with your finger cymbals both ways described in this video? Or does one work better for you?

If you are ready to take your zilling to the next level I invite you to join me for my online course: “More Zillicious Zills” – designed to take your zilling from basic to scintillating with interesting sounds, riffs, patterns, combinations and more. Become the confident zill star you were meant to be and join me here!

http://SahiraBellyDances.com/MoreZillicious

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