"Stop Screwing Around"

Good advice at any time … and it's also the slogan of "pinchClips", a new gadget for keeping your cymbals in place.

It's surprising how often complicated problems have simple solutions. Take the ubiquitous cymbal stand wing nut. They're economical, very effective, and have been around since day one. But wing nuts have a dark side. Aside from always rolling under the bass drum when dropped, they are slow and finicky to work with. The commercial solutions that I've seen thus far have all been expensive and rather complicated. I think the pinchClip is going to change all that, and for about the same price as a wing nut.

Actually I'd been thinking about such a device myself, something in the way of a binder clip that fits on a cymbal stand. Well that's sort of what the pinchClip is, but it’s even simpler -- and very elegant. It looks a bit like a hair clip and fits over the threaded rod of a cymbal stand with a quick squeeze and release.

Here's how it works:

1. Remove wing nut
2. Squeeze pinchClip and put it on the stand
(Optional: Retrieve wing nut from under bass drum.)

And that’s it.

I gave the clips a pretty good workout and they stayed put (although I can’t vouch for how they’d stand up under very heavy playing). But that's not the real issue. With the pinchClips, tear-down of my cymbals now takes seconds, not minutes. (I actually timed it: 8 seconds.)

I only see two potential issues. If you like to crank down wing nuts as tight as possible, the pinchClip won't do that -- but that’s a good thing. Also, they can make a tiny clicking sound under some conditions. Not a real problem most of the time, but it might be an issue in, for example, a recording studio. I can't attest for how they'll behave under bezerk bashing and that's all I'll say about that.

I've switched over both my teaching and gigging sets to pinchClips because I've been wanting this sort of solution for a very long time. I’m also tired of searching for wing nuts in dark rooms.

www.pinch-clip.com