Collection: Cow Bells/Agogo Bells

Cowbells and agogo bells from Groove Masters Percussion and MEINL.

These are struck metal bells with no clapper inside, played with a wooden stick or a beater. What they share is a hard, dry, cutting tone with very little ring, which is exactly what lets a bell part stay audible over a room full of drums.

In West African and Latin ensembles that is not decoration. The bell usually holds the timeline, the repeating pattern that every other part counts against, so it is one of the more important jobs in a drum circle rather than a colour added on top.

Agogo bells are two bells of different sizes joined by a curved metal arm, giving a high and a low tone from one instrument, and squeezing the arm produces a third sound as the bells strike each other. GMP stocks a standard model and an open-ended version.

Cowbells come hand-held and mounted, in steel and in painted finishes. The GMP eight inch hand-held model is the larger and lower of the range, and MEINL supplies a steel bell and a bell with a beater included.