ALEXANDER DUVEL: My name is Alexander Duvel, and I’m the managing guy around here at Andy’s Music here on 2300 West Belmont in Chicago. We’re sitting here in a part of our 4,500 square feet where we have, gosh, probably one of the most interesting collections for sale of musical instruments in the Midwest, probably the country.

We’re here with our gong collection right now, and gosh, there’s an awful lot to say about these. I’ve been selling a lot of them. There’s been an awful lot of interest in the gong lately for all certain, all different kinds of musical purposes, but a lot of people are getting into them from a very sort of Yogic and/or spiritual sort of meditative side.

The correct way of saying it actually is Paiste [PRONOUNCED PIES-TEA]. It’s a, you know, German name, Swiss name. It’s a European thing and they are a wonderful, wonderful company that’s been around for a good long time now. They’ve made an awful lot of different innovations to the world of the gong in terms of different styles of design and tonal characteristics that they’ve been able to create out of these different kinds of metal. The real, real, sort of innovation I guess right off there is the nickel-silver alloy bronze that they use for their gongs, which is very different than your average Chinese, you know, more bell bronze or gong bronze.

A gong like this, this is -- The design of the gong is what’s known as the symphonic gong, the symphonic design. That’s the Paiste idea, but when they put the Planet symbol on there or when they have -- you know, there’s a way that they tune the gong to a specific frequency, and these actually they’re known as the Planet Gongs. Very, very much, they take a lot more time on the lathes and the hammer benches and stuff and so they’re a lot more, they tend to be a little bit higher quality than the average symphonic gongs, which you can see on this wall, where you just have it, you know, they’ll have a logo on it just there and they’re standard, you know, or no logo, so we actually put in a special order a while ago where we got gongs with no logos.

This is, you know, this is your average sort of size Paiste Planet Gong. It’s the Chiron Gong.

[ALEXANDER DUVEL PLAYING THE PAISTE PLANET GONG CHIRON]

And it’s very -- There’s a lot of different ranges of sound from very, very, very focused, low fundamental frequency to a lot of wash that you can create.

When you make a gong, you’re trying to sort of isolate different parts of the metal. So, in a gong like this, it’s actually not flat. There’s a very nice ridge here that is pronounced, and then there is another smaller ridge in the center, and all of these marks are done with, I think, a pneumatic bit of some sort that drills out this pattern. But what we’re trying to do, there’s a lot of hammer blows also but they tend to be more symmetrical so that when the sound radiates from the center of the gong. It has a way of coming back on itself and centering.