Question about hi hats

Y

ypsilon

New Member
Joined
Aug 2, 2012
Hello,

After a while of experimenting and learning basics im getting better at producing basic dnb sounds/tracks but theres still one thing im struggling with, and that is getting good sounding hi hats and shakers

I know theres a lot of breaks out on the internet but since i prefer making/doing everything myself im looking for a tutorial which explains having good sounding hi hat patterns. the thing im mostly talking about is the 'swing?' between the first snare and second kick when talking about the basic dnb pattern. I hope you understand what i mean and if there is any tutorials or other things that explain this it would help me a lot

Thanks for your time and possible help :pimp:
 
I dont know if it's mentionned in the link Pantyinspector posted, but what I like to do with my hats is, double them and pitch the second hi hats to +7 or -5, dependin on your base hat sound, it gives it more presence and fullness.
that and also highpass/eq/process some breaks and just makes them enter slightly with your orignal hats to give extra rhythmic to your hats pattern.
 
Mr Fletch said:
THIS

I cant begin to tell you how simple yet amazingly effective it is to have a basic hat pattern transformed with some triplet delay
Click to expand...

For the record, the credit for this tip belongs to Fletch. Since he mentioned it in another post I have been using it nonstop with my hats. Big up Fletch!!
 
Yeah it was in one of your tutorials where you showed us how to EQ drums and you briefly said about putting a tape delay on your high hats. Works a treat!
 
I always high pass my high hats, would recommend you do the same for drum & bass sounding hats. If your looking for swing, the best tip I can give is to have your hats go up and down in notes. Toss them in a sampler and play around. I learned that from the Octane & DLR sample pack, I would recommend you buy it cause it makes high hat swing a lot more logical.
 
Have you tried playing the hats into your DAW? if you dont have a drumpad controller, even assigning some keyboard keys and playing with those can give a little gentle groove to your beats. make sure quantize is off. You can record at a slower tempo and speed it up then.

as an alternative, moving a hit a little bit ahead or behind the grid can introduce a swing or groove. hits that arrive before the beat sound rushed, or tense or excited, and hits that occur after the beat are perceived as laidback, relaxed or mellow. This is especially noticable on the snare, but you can rush and drag hihat hits in the same way. The bass or subbass can support this movement too, so the whole beat seems to propell itself forward, then relax then hop forward again (all subtly done of course - for more extreme usage check out some grime or garage, the beats often lurch and stagger more than swing back and forth). some daws support groove templates too which you might want to experiment with. these automatically offset the hits a little forward and behind the grid in common patterns, but really, tweaking this stuff manually will do wonders for your sense of rhythm
 
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