Dirty hi-hats/ride

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DjCartel

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Sorry to make another cybal thread, but this ones been bugging me. Those people that have the Enei sample pack will be able to understand this question very easily.

Im looking to make the "dirty" hats that enei uses. Its deffinately a ride/open hat on every beat but i cant get it to sound right. Ive tried side chaining them to the kick, snare etc to get the same effect but cant seem to. Ive had to eq out all the low end of one of eneis breaks just to get the cybals, but i want to make them myself. any ideas?
 
I think you should try different distortions on them, I love applying some multiband distortion on cymbals and breaks. Dont know the right sound you are looking for but try different blends of cymbals together and whatnot
 
Might be pissing in wind here but you tried some real snappy distorted white noise over the top of the hit?
 
I have started having a Return with a saturation plug on it, on the ableton one, stick it on something heavy like Hard, then send some signal to it. You retain some extra clarity I think using a send, as oppose to sticking the plug on the actual channel. Have no idea if that will help, but might be something to look at, maybe mess with OD's/Dist's on the Return Channel.
Its probably good for Snares also, where you keep that original clean snare to work how you wanted it, and mix in some grit on top of the clean one.

I am pontificating from studying a guys guitar rig. His sound was dirty, but still had a piercing clarity to the notes, and not like the muddy shit I was getting out of my guitar amp. The Guy ran a 2 Amp Setup with one big clean clear signal, and one dirty signal mixing together(He Eq'd one with scooped mids, and one with boosted mids, to meld them together) to get one almighty guitar tone. Sort of translating that idea to these situations. My brain thinks funny sometimes, but I think that is a nice concept, and a big advert for Return Channels.
 
tewky1 said:
I have started having a Return with a saturation plug on it, on the ableton one, stick it on something heavy like Hard, then send some signal to it. You retain some extra clarity I think using a send, as oppose to sticking the plug on the actual channel. Have no idea if that will help, but might be something to look at, maybe mess with OD's/Dist's on the Return Channel.
Its probably good for Snares also, where you keep that original clean snare to work how you wanted it, and mix in some grit on top of the clean one.

I am pontificating from studying a guys guitar rig. His sound was dirty, but still had a piercing clarity to the notes, and not like the muddy shit I was getting out of my guitar amp. The Guy ran a 2 Amp Setup with one big clean clear signal, and one dirty signal mixing together(He Eq'd one with scooped mids, and one with boosted mids, to meld them together) to get one almighty guitar tone. Sort of translating that idea to these situations. My brain thinks funny sometimes, but I think that is a nice concept, and a big advert for Return Channels.
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That's a fooking good idea! Forgot about sends etc, makes pefect sense!
 
some great tips in here, this thread has proved pretty usefull! will deffinately be trialing it all tonight.

I do find sends maintain the volume more than modulating dry/wet!
 
Not just sends tho, sidechain the sends off the kick n snare, can even take a few send hits and reverse them in as audio make em stop abruptly etc (this works really well in dubstep not so much dnb) but for that octane dlr, xtrah, type sound. its just the right rides and crashes in a sequence sidechained.

Basically link all your crashes and rides to one channel stick a reverb on with the dry wet kinda low, then compress the shit out of it! Then side chain that or try control it within the hits via attacks and decays, whichever works or sounds best for the tune?

And for tappy hats (if you wanted to know lol) use pitch and filter envelopes to get them to snap, the pitch amount shouldnt be much the filt should be alot. What I saw a friend do was get a group of hats (in fruity slicer) have one clean and then clone it and make that one a bandpass with a filter envelope so its tappin the mids then play with the volume to get them sittin together right (spor an break do this a lot) i call it waka waka, coz thats exactly wat it sounds like, almost like scratching but it layers up really well.
 
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Yeah Return/Sends are great fun, I love that sidechain idea, play with that one day.

I was messing the other day, but I had some drums, sending to A Real Short Reverb B Saturator C Subtle Delay(low singal sent, really low in mix) D BP Filter LFO'ing about and an Overdrive running before it. Dirtied the break right up hahaha, maybe a bit too much lerl

I went way overboard with all of it, but you cna really get some great stuff out if them. Found now I mix it in till I can hear the sound of it quite clear, then work down wards so its more of a subtlety than a focus. You can mess it up if you go way overboard with stuff. Till I can hear it, turn it down a little seems to be nice for adding filtered stuff to drums. Alternatively you can go hog wild with stuff, I like running higher mid sounds through Band pass lately, keeps your full sound but you get that movement as well :)

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DjCartel said:
some great tips in here, this thread has proved pretty usefull! will deffinately be trialing it all tonight.

I do find sends maintain the volume more than modulating dry/wet!
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you can also use multiple effects with the sends, wet dry you cant without affecting your whole sound, unless you went some elaborate Effect Rack route.

Oh, and the other day i noticed you can send return channels onto to other return channels(in Ableton), so you can do even more twisting with stuff there, madness I tell ya!
 
Sammy Dexcell said:
I'm trying so hard to learn Abelton! Really wanna make the switch or use both. It's just about learning a whole other DAW! :-/
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what do you use at the moment? i went from reason to Ableton. the two couldnt be more different, but ableton just makes sense. in ableton if you think, what would be the logical way of doing that, its normally how you actually do it. With reason, it was a whole load of confusion!

Make the switch, you wont be disapointed.

as for your tips, sounds intersting. at the moment ive just got 1 ride playing constantly with a side chain. adding different cymbals, then bussing to a new side chain (maybe on a send with other fx) could add a lot! thanks to all that have inputted!
 
DjCartel said:
what do you use at the moment? i went from reason to Ableton. the two couldnt be more different, but ableton just makes sense. in ableton if you think, what would be the logical way of doing that, its normally how you actually do it. With reason, it was a whole load of confusion!

Make the switch, you wont be disapointed.

as for your tips, sounds intersting. at the moment ive just got 1 ride playing constantly with a side chain. adding different cymbals, then bussing to a new side chain (maybe on a send with other fx) could add a lot! thanks to all that have inputted!
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The Suite also has some powerful stuff going on in there!
 
I won't be a dick and name drop but I went to a really sick dubstep producers house for a week while I was stayin in UK and he basically made me want to learn Ableton.
After the week was up I had the basic jist of it and can lay down tracks add midi, FX play with automation (which is so heavy) etc
Also what I liked the most is I'm a maths guy. So having control of everything via numbers i.e not just a knob that you have to fine tune, (you can literally input an exact number on anything) makes so much more sense to me! Working out values of pitches and oscillations of waves etc to the decimal point is what intrigued me most as you cant get away with that in FL. (which is what I use btw lol)
I may just create it all in FL once im happy export and arrange in Ableton add final touches etc as the overall mixdown i feel can be controlled way better in Abe. Just about actually doing it lol I feel like im back to square one when I open it sometimes tho. Not a good feeling lol
 
kieran t said:
do you guys layer your hats like you would snares and maybe kicks
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it depends on the hats i'm using really but yes i layer the hats directly on top of each other sometimes, but only when i'm working with one-shots that are live hats. i don't layer synthetic hats. the reason why is i started doing that is because sometimes the live hats aren't the best of quality so i EQ the garbage out and sometimes they sound a little thin or just not quite good enough on their own but they end up sounding like they have great overhead to layer over some other hats so i use them that way and i'm no professional but i'm pleased with the outcome. so much so that i use that approach even when the hats sound quality is fine, i'll dedicate one of them as the main hat and any other layered hat is overhead.

one thing i've had trouble with, and i think this is related and on-topic, is trying to get my cymbals sounding like a lot of other dnb songs i hear the past couple years. their cymbals gel together to the point where they sound like one long wet loop with no intervals of silence in between the cymbal hits, almost like a reverb would do but i don't hear any reverb. i've tried a couple different things like using white noise, distorted rides, and sidechaining them, i can't seem to pull it off. i hear this style of drums in a lot of liquid dnb but it's definitely not limited to liquid, i've heard it in other dnb songs too. i'm gonna have to try this to see if it's what i'm talkin about too cuz i haven't tried reverb and what i'm talking about definitely seems to gel together in a smudged/blurred sort of way and a reverb would make sense.

Sammy Dexcell said:
its just the right rides and crashes in a sequence sidechained.

Basically link all your crashes and rides to one channel stick a reverb on with the dry wet kinda low, then compress the shit out of it! Then side chain that or try control it within the hits via attacks and decays, whichever works or sounds best for the tune?
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Thanks Sammy i'm gonna try that out and if you feel the itch to switch to Ableton then go for it. about a year and a half ago i switched from Reason to Ableton too and like DjCartel said, Ableton just makes more sense... especially after dealing with Reason for years. the only thing that was time-consuming was getting acquainted with all the ableton plugins really.
 
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Some really cool stuff in this thread!

Heres something you can do in Ableton.Route all your hits to a single audio track.Then make an audio effect rack.Open the chain list and duplicate the chain so you have 2-one for the dry signal and one for the wet.Then on the wet signal stick an EQ8,reverb,distortion,compression and make it sound really grimey.I highpass it above 500 hz and then make a short reverb(~1 s) and play with the dry-wet and overdrive,saturator,compressor(the new glue compressor is fuckin amazing,so is the convolution reverb for that matter).Then you map the volume of the dry chain to macro 1 and the volume of the wet to macro 2.I put the dry to 0 db and play with the wet(dont overdo it).Then i can add after the effect rack some more compression(the Mix gel preset is good for this-you want to mix the two nothing serious) and a limiter.

This way I think I have more control over the sound and the breaks sound really great even if they are just one-shots and fairly minimal.It can add depth to your drums and make them sound like one.
 
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