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 like a gong like this. Here, that’s a Chinese gong known as a Chau gong. It’s -- It has the properties that most people sort of understand about gongs, you know, being very sort of bassy but also very loud and washy and resonant.

The Paiste material tends to be a little bit brighter and shimmerier and has a lot of layers of sound, and that’s what makes them such unbelievably powerful instruments to use for meditatioin.

This is known as an Earth Sound Creation Gong. Sound Creation Gongs are a little less well know but they have a very, very different tonal characteristic than your average symphonic gongs.

You know, the gong isn’t -- It means that the sound can never sit in one place, so you have a much more chaotic but, you know, still very, very...

[ALEXANDER DUVEL PLAYING A PAISTE SOUND CREATION EARTH GONG]

...very, very strong, very, very present sound.

[ALEXANDER DUVEL ALLOWING A PAISTE SOUND CREATION CHAKRA GONG TO RESONATE]

But there’s no real fundamental. The fundamental gets kind of blown out...,

[ALEXANDER DUVEL PLAYING A PAISTE SOUND CREATION CHAKRA GONG]

...because there nowhere for the sound to sort of rest or just focus, a very different design.

The hammer blows are very, very chaotically dispersed all over the gong, and also from both angles, from the back of the gong and the front, and so that put set -- that sets up a lot of different kinds of waves that have a much more sort of non-centered tonal quality, and that’s really a very -- That’s very -- you know, with gongs we’re almost shaping the sound we want to put into the air because they vibrate so strongly against the air.