Beginner cymbals: what to upgrade, and in what order

Why the cymbals are the part that disappoints first

A beginner drum kit is a bundle, and bundles are priced by finding somewhere to save money. The shells are usually fine: a wrapped poplar shell with a working lug is a perfectly serviceable drum, and a new head transforms it for very little. The hardware is usually adequate. The cymbals are where the money came from.

The cymbals that ship with a sub-five-hundred-dollar kit are thin stamped brass, and the giveaway is not the sound of a single hit — it is what happens when the student plays faster. A good cymbal articulates: you can hear the individual strokes. A cheap one washes into a single continuous noise, and the student concludes they cannot play cleanly when in fact they cannot hear whether they are playing cleanly. That is the real cost, and it is a teaching problem rather than a tone problem.

This is also why cymbals are the one upgrade worth making before a student has proved they will stick with it. A new snare head is nice. A throne is comfort. Cymbals that articulate change whether practice works. If the kit itself is still the question rather than the cymbals, start at our beginner drum set roundup instead and come back here in a year.

Replace the hi-hats first. Not the crash.

Almost everyone gets this backwards, and the reason is understandable: the crash is the dramatic cymbal, the one in the videos, the one a student wants. But count the hits. In an ordinary rock or pop groove the hi-hats are struck eight times a bar and the crash perhaps twice in a song. The hi-hats are, by a wide margin, the cymbal a student spends their practice hours listening to.

Hi-hats are also the hardest cymbal to make cheaply, because they are a matched pair. The top and bottom have to be different weights and have to sit against each other evenly, or the closed sound is a dead clack instead of a tight chick, and the half-open sound — the one every real groove uses — does not exist at all. A bundled kit's hats are very often two identical stamped discs, which is why no amount of technique produces the sound the student is chasing.

Why a matched pack beats buying one good cymbal

The instinct is to buy one proper crash and keep the stock everything-else. It is the wrong move, for a reason that has nothing to do with brand loyalty: cymbals from one series are designed to sit together. One bright professional crash alongside three dull stamped discs does not read as an upgrade. It reads as one cymbal that does not belong, and it makes the stock cymbals sound worse by comparison rather than better by association.

A matched pack also costs dramatically less per cymbal than buying the same cymbals individually, and for a student that difference is usually the difference between replacing every position and replacing one. Every full pack on this page lands below what two comparable single cymbals cost — check the current prices on the cards and you will see it.

How we chose these

We have not played these cymbals, and we say so on every page — see how we research these picks. The criteria below are ones a published specification can actually answer, applied in this order:

Brass, bronze, and what the alloy names actually mean

Cymbal marketing is full of series names that sound like materials and are not. The underlying distinction is simple and worth knowing, because it is the single biggest determinant of both price and sound.

The practical reading for a parent: do not pay a bronze premium for a first-year student. The jump from bundled stamped cymbals to a matched brass pack is the biggest single improvement available at this level, and the jump from brass to bronze is a smaller improvement for a lot more money. Make the second jump when the student asks for it by name.

Can you keep any of the stock cymbals?

Sometimes, and it is worth checking rather than binning them. A stock crash has a second life as a cheap effects cymbal — stacked under a better one, or hung on the far side of the kit for the one moment a song needs an ugly noise. Nobody minds if it cracks.

Stock hi-hats are different: once replaced, they have no use, because their failure is that the pair does not work as a pair. The one thing not to do is sell them on as if they were cymbals worth buying. And if any stock cymbal has a crack, it is finished — a cracked cymbal spreads along the crack with every hit and can throw a sharp edge. That one goes in the recycling.

When not to buy cymbals yet

Three situations where this purchase is premature, and we would rather say so than sell into them.

The kit is electronic. Cymbal packs do not fit electronic kits, which use rubber or mesh pads wired to a module. If the cymbal sounds on an electronic kit are the problem, that is a module question, not a cymbal question.

The student has been playing for under a month. Not because they have not earned it, but because the kit itself is often the thing to reconsider at that point — and if the kit is going to be replaced inside a year, the cymbals that come with the new one change the sum.

Volume is the real complaint. If the actual problem is that nobody in the house can stand the noise, better cymbals make it worse, not better. A good cymbal is louder and sustains longer than a bad one. That situation needs the low-volume set, hearing protection, or a different instrument entirely.

Which pack for which student

The purchase nobody warns you about

A three-cymbal pack arriving at a house with a budget kit very often cannot be mounted. Bundled kits ship with a hi-hat stand and one cymbal arm, sometimes bolted to the bass drum. So the ride has nowhere to go, and the family discovers this on the day the box arrives.

Budget for at least one stand alongside the cymbals, and prefer a boom over a straight stand. A boom arm reaches over the kit, which is the only way to put a 20-inch ride somewhere a short player can strike it without leaning. A straight stand has to sit where the leg base fits, and on a small kit that is rarely where the cymbal needs to be.

Sizes, in plain terms

Before you add anything to the basket