Our Sound files

At Cymbal Junkie we make high quality, honest capture sound files. They are recorded with no EQ, compression, filters, plug-ins, or sound processing of any kind. We never add or take anything away from the raw acoustic recording so that you can hear the real sound of every cymbal. This makes listening to our sound files is as close as possible to playing the cymbal yourself.

This is our small, but perfectly formed cymbal studio where we record all our cymbals.

We spent a long time experimenting with different sound treatments and mics. Our studio monitors are right at the kit in the drummer's playing position. It took many (many!) hours of recording, listening, adjusting and comparing different equipment until we were happy that the cymbals sounded the same in our recordings as they did live in the room.

The mics and equipment

We use a simple 3 mic set up to capture the organic sound of the cymbals and drums. The mics are in a 'natural' sound position with nothing close miced.

The mics are an Earthworks DK-25R set, which have an extremely flat response and are specifically designed to capture the real acoustic sound of cymbals and drums. Their signal passes through an Audient interface, which has the most neutral drivers in its class and adds little or no colouration of its own. That sound is fed into our DAW where we don't add or take anything away from the raw signal. And that's our approach - direct from cymbal to sound file with nothing changed along the way.

Cymbal Junkie - the home of handcrafted cymbals.