We knew this was coming due to things that happened in the past year or so. I have posted most of this on forums before but I will elaborate due to the logo and just so people can know more about us. I know our web site is vague, at least to us it is vague.
First, I have always had a very public stance that we buy our cymbals from China and Turkey. Today this is around 60/40, up from 50/50 a year ago.
Unfortunately, we can't do our own casting and we are at least 5 years away from doing this (within regulations). So we have to find companies that will cast for us. We used to purchase almost everything from China in the beginning, then we only purchased from Turkey and things were wonderful. Almost all of the original Mists were Turkish. We also had a prototype "I" series that used to have a diamond cymbal under the bell. This was going to be our Diamond series with beautiful deep and plentiful hammering. However, something happened that was really odd and this plant suddenly stopped doing business with us. We have no idea what happened but it put us in a really bad position (much worse than this current situation). So, we had to find a new factory. We found a plant in China that was great and they did everything within our designs and they would make adjustments and they really worked great with us. To this day, we still use this factory.
Years later, we found a very good supplier in Turkey that also works with us very well and we still use this factory today. Why do we use 2 factories? We learned the very hard way that if one goes down, we have to have a back up.
Then the stagg brand came a long and become this factory's biggest customer. We all of a sudden started getting in cymbal blanks with 'stagg' faintly on them. We didn't even catch this until an endorser mentioned this to us. We were shocked because there are some cymbals that we get from the factory that comes with the top finish on it that we don't touch and we do all customizing from the bottom side. We were even more shocked when we realized that there are a lot of these type cymbals floating around. So, I wasn't shocked at all when Brian mentioned he found a cymbal with stagg faintly on it. Even though there are tons of companies that do this sort of thing, why would we ever want anyone to know any of this? Because it makes us look like a lesser cymbal crafting company. But again, we can't cast our own blanks so we have to rely on cymbal factories to do most of the foundry work for us.
Are we stagg? Are we a Turkish type company? No to both. We just get the best blanks we can get and modify them to what customers want. All cymbals are lathed and hammered and about 50% of these are even retempered to adjust tone. We also reshape some cymbals but not as much as one might expect. We use pneumatic and hand hammering for our hammering and we put tons of time into each cymbal to make it as best for the customers desires as possible.
We actually started modifying cymbals in 2000 with the SH series. We were in a sense custom back then, but we couldn't do hardly anything with sound modification compared to today.
Is this embarrassing? Oh Yes! But, we are in this position because we can't roll the alloy. We can do the melting and mixing, but it stops at this point. Then we pick up after the cymbal has some of its beginning hammering, then we can do everything afterward, like lathing, any type of hammering, minor adjustments to shaping and retempering. We thought about asking for donations to afford a roller, but I would rather learn everything I can about the latter stages of cymbal modification and sound control before getting into rolling.
So what is Saluda in my eyes? It is a company that takes cymbal descriptions and creates such a cymbal for anyone. We know the type of sound we have and we know our ability to create excellent sounding cymbals.
If anyone has any questions at all, please PM or email me at info@saludacymbals.com.
Jamie
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Drums are fun, cars are sick, music is great, and life is alright.
"I never said that gear makes the player...I just wanted to exploit the other side of the argument."
