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Photo courtesy of Cymascope.com Way back in the 1970s I was a fine art student. I was fortunate indeed to have a number of great tutors, but the one outstanding influence on me was Keith Critchlow. His lectures on sacred geometry were a marvel and a great source of inspiration to several of my contemporaries as well as myself. Nearly all my paintings, sculpture and now gongs and sound instruments have had their genesis in his teaching. With Keith we surveyed Chartres Ca

In conventional gong making , the material grows harder and harder the more that one hammers, and this can lead to brittleness and even cracking if taken to extremes. Brass and bronze alloys are therefore frequently re-heated and slowly cooled in a process called annealing. This returns the metal to its original softer nature. With titanium this is not possible; heating the metal in fact hardens it! However, when all the cold forging is complete, the stresses in the metal

The reason that I call my gongs ELEMENTAL I have played percussion for all of my adult life. Cymbals and gongs have always had a hierarchy of alloys as they increase in price and quality. Basic ones are brass (an alloy of copper and zinc), more expensive are bronze (an alloy of copper and tin and sometimes nickel) In the past I have made conventional gongs in these traditional materials, plus a few experimental pieces in stainless steel. A few years ago I purchased a large sh