How To Treat Hats

[Hovmod]

But the real question is: do you condone whacking hats with women?

Whacking OFF with women.

[dan_s]

But the real question is: do you condone whacking hats with women?

Whacking OFF with women.

[Emerald Tablet]

ok

golden tip

last time i post it

your ready?

here we go

oh and before i share it

mention me in all your productions

here we go

Slow Flanger on the hat. mix on 3%

every hit sounds different now.

EQ? remove mid

thats all i do.

than again i suck

and my sound too

[dennisjr]

I'm having real problems getting my hi hats to sound good. Mine ALWAYS sound lifeless, thin and metallic.
I'm making electronically based music at the moment, so most of the sounds are from the classic x0x machines. I don't particularly like the idea of sampling

So guys, how do you make your hi-hits sound good?

As someone mentioned earlier:
Delay
But do it subtle

Or as I and many others would do:
Sidechaing
Depends on what sequencer and fx you use.
If you use Cubase, or Ableton you are lucky because they just implemented easy sidechaining in their latest updates.

[ckatrun411]

ok

golden tip

last time i post it

your ready?

here we go

oh and before i share it

mention me in all your productions

here we go

Slow Flanger on the hat. mix on 3%

every hit sounds different now.

EQ? remove mid

thats all i do.

than again i suck

and my sound too

PHAT ASS TIP... ie the 3% percent flange

cheers

[Chopper]

oh, and try to side chain them with the kick and snare

[Cryogenic]

Subtle flanger or chorus = teh buttarh

[markroom]

Hi,

Just wondering what genere? and tempo?

ive read a lot about hats and i think it comes down to using the right samples
and right pattern- if you keep at it you will eventually get something useable if you despair and think its impossible you'll give up


i've heard rules like you should have a different hat every second - ie you need some variance - whether velocity or multiple samples-

hats will benifit greatly from layering-

alos i would suggest using hi hat chooking- basically this mimics a real kit - your closed hat sample should end the open hat sample- this is easy to do in Fl studio by using the cutx by x in the sampler-


A few tricks- use an arrpegiator , use a loop of real hats - or keep them simply- you dont always have to make a huge future.

Try using impulse in abelton - the samples in that sucker will go with anything-

[The Chase]

I'm completely ruthless with my hats (and all my sounds and especially drums, really, but let me give an example with hats). I'll warn you that I don't work in the most orthodox of ways.

First off, I hate noisy sounds. As a person who loves cymbals and distortion, this can create fragile sweet spots for sound design. Even when I was a drummer I was peculiar about cymbals. Most are too noisy for me. The ones that aren't noisy will be either dark or too bell-like. For me, the right amount of ring while remaining bright and not sounding like a bell is the sweet spot for crashes and rides. This is why I went through three 16" Zildjian K-Custom Dark Crashes.

Anyways, for hihats in particular, I like them to have a strong "tick" for an attack. This TICK will have low frequencies far below the fundamental of the bell's fundamental (It's important to remember that cymbals ARE bells whether certain drummers like to admit it or not. From a physics stand-point, they are. If you don't like thinking of them that way, get over it). Because they are hi hats, they can get away with being a little bit more noisy than the rest of the cymbals, but make up for it in being more ringy.

The thing is, while I love for the attack to have these lower frequencies so it hits harder, I don't really want the body of the hat to have too much of these frequencies, so one can't just EQ in the low end of the hi hat, as the body of the hat having these low frequencies robs you of mix clarity and headroom. Therefore, I will apply parallel processing to exploit the strong points of different audio streams, combining them afterwards. I will have one hi hat track with a compressor with an outrageous ratio to accent the attack as much as possible (in fact I will often put a gate after that so the channel will be ONLY the attack of the hi hats). Now that I have the attack isolated, I will apply the appropriate amounts of EQ to bring out the low end on the attack to make the mentioned TICK hit harder.

I'm also known to send the attack of the hats through ungodly distortion to further emphasize hardness, but in a controlled way, as opposed to using distortion to get that way-too-distorted drum sound, as heard in industrial IDM. I also don't like adding distortion to hihats because it just makes them noisier. Limiting the distortion to only the attack will allow me to utilize what I like from distortion without being stuck with what I don't like from it.

Meanwhile on the other parallel track, with EQ, I'll accentuate the ring while deadening the noise (not completely killing the noise or anything, but merely making the ring stand out more, so when you hear it in the full mix, you hear the peculiar ring of the hat, and not just more percussive noise).

Then I will combine the two tracks, adjusting the mix of the two as necessary, and maybe applying further processing if the two need to be brought together.

I've never been into the modulation effect on the hihats. For blatant sound design yea, but for subtle variation it just sounds awkward to me. For variation I'd much rather use layering tricks, such as varying the mix of various layered samples for each hit.

Just a little hint into my lack of sanity

[martian]

Anyways, for hihats in particular, I like them to have a strong "tick" for an attack. This TICK will have low frequencies far below the fundamental of the bell's fundamental (It's important to remember that cymbals ARE bells whether certain drummers like to admit it or not. From a physics stand-point, they are. If you don't like thinking of them that way, get over it). Because they are hi hats, they can get away with being a little bit more noisy than the rest of the cymbals, but make up for it in being more ringy.

The thing is, while I love for the attack to have these lower frequencies so it hits harder, I don't really want the body of the hat to have too much of these frequencies, so one can't just EQ in the low end of the hi hat, as the body of the hat having these low frequencies robs you of mix clarity and headroom. Therefore, I will apply parallel processing to exploit the strong points of different audio streams, combining them afterwards. I will have one hi hat track with a compressor with an outrageous ratio to accent the attack as much as possible (in fact I will often put a gate after that so the channel will be ONLY the attack of the hi hats). Now that I have the attack isolated, I will apply the appropriate amounts of EQ to bring out the low end on the attack to make the mentioned TICK hit harder.

sounds like you like a dc offset 'thump' at the start.

Just a little hint into my lack of sanity

we all have our own bizare explanation for what we like and do, i certainly do, but not for hats.

i like mine thick and noisy, with a very soft transient, 12db high passed around 150-200hz, and linear/smooth sloping freq response up to about 18k. usually takes layering a few good samples to get.

[Vendetta]

ok

golden tip

last time i post it

your ready?

here we go

oh and before i share it

mention me in all your productions

here we go

Slow Flanger on the hat. mix on 3%

every hit sounds different now.

EQ? remove mid

thats all i do.

than again i suck

and my sound too

The very same goes for cymbals, just apply around 3 or 8% to them. It gives them a "glossy effect", moderate the % of the phaser. Also the midrange tip works well.

Dave

[experimental.crow]

Bob: Hats. Okay? Hats. If I ever see a hat on a bed in this house, man,
like you'll never see me again. I'm gone.
Diane: That makes two of us.
Nadine: Why a hat?
Bob: Because that's just the way it is, sweetie.

[csmoening]

sorry if this has been said already..

i find that if you need a brighter quality to your hats, it's better to roll off the lower mids than to boost the "air" frequencies. both will make your hats sound more open but cutting will help you sit it in the mix.

cut to make things sound better.
boost to make things sound different.

[qa2pir]

Throw all your percussion (including bass drum) into a drum bus, and add compression to that. Now the hat will be playing with different amplitude depending on the pattern of the other drums. An easy way to make natural sounding "volume automation" without thinking too much.

You could of course do parallell compression if it sounds too squashed. You could also have copies on the drums still running on separate channels, and EQ the group channel like a hihat (hipass etc).

[rifftrax]

whatever anybody posts here, there's allways somebody who'll say: "It's stupid, there's no rules, use your artistic imagination"

Well.

I think that it's very smart, there are rules, and never use imagination.