sad hats

jimjimjim

jimjimjim

oldskool
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Sep 8, 2009
Location
Slough UK
Hey,
Had a break from producing for a few weeks (been playing RO2 hehe)
Anyways.
So i come back to it and all my drums sound crap - the hats sound robotic - like a metronome.
What tricks do you guys use to make your hats/shakers sound good?

Tried adding some shuffle / changing velocity to emphaise the beat (harder on each 4th) - all sounds gay.

any tips to make happy hats?

cheers
 
use some very subtle pitchshifting on them, and I mean ranging between one semitown up and one down, very finetuned. Changing the sample offset in the same manner also works wonders. Combine this with velocity changes, and when done right the gayness should eventually disappear.
 
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thanks man -i never thought about changing the pitch :not_worth

What do you mean by changing the sample offset? (sorry im not too good with terms)

hopefully have some hetro hats soon !
 
Same as reactor grits said, play with pitch, combining different samples for adding accents, very light reverbs, small and silent reversed hi hats before an other hihat to create a 'shhhTIK' sound and of course, use good samples. Have you tried acoustic sample packs? Some of them feature the same hi hat but each time played with different intonation, you might want to look into that :)
 
I remember talking to a fella on the train about music and he said "I make hip-hop, so, you know, I work with hi-hats a lot."

---------- Post added at 11:36 ---------- Previous post was at 11:33 ----------

Oh, and I forgot who posted it on this forum, but panning hats is a great effect. I used to have one hat, but now I actually invest some time into them and it's very rewarding having 5 different hats, all HPF'ed, all panned (slightly) differently.

Reason NN-XT has a "random" LFO that you can use to pitch hats "randomly".
 
everything here, Horace's multi-sampled hats for the win.
Mr Gritz's sample offset is the same as sample start point? so some hits don't have the bright attack transients.> Linking velocity to pitch, volume and sample start point in the sampler can work.
Hats from all those old breaks you get can sound good and natural, it's just finding good clean sections without too many other drum tails in the back.
 
wow.
you guys rule thats awesome.
those tips are all great.
i use reason - hadnt thought about putting them in a sampler - so i can reverse,pan, shift all in there. sweet.
:mr_cool:
 
Try adding another track of high hats (loops come in handy here). EQ out all the low end of this new track. Next, send both hi hat channels to a bus with a compressor inserted to "glue" both instruments together. Then send the hi hat submix to your drum group. For extra pump, side chain your snare to your hi hat group.

Cheers.
 
Try different accenting patterns than just every fourth. For instance if you have 8 hats in a bar, accent the 1st, 4th and 7th. This is a common pattern. Also, if you can, play with the length of the decay or release, you can introduce shuffly feels by having some sloshy hat sounds that are different lengths. Also, use non gay samples.
 
one thing that hasn't been stated here yet is the amount of hi-hats, Lucider saying 5 hat thing...
most of the time, to give an accent to some hi-hats I find velocity unaccurate to get the naturality hh's should have...
what I do is first, work on each sample separately, spend like 10-20 mins on each hi hat, it will be worth it, and save them into a folder the amount of layers you'll be having in like 1 hi hat should be at the end of the day like ~3 hi hats, and in a tune i usually have like +10 hi-hat samples, so, when I want to accent a sample I play 2 at the same time (which would fill more of the freq spectrum) rather than making it sound louder (louder velocity)...

Shuffling in dnb has a very tiny effect except for triplets, at least, in my experience.

Bear in mind I'm a harddnb-darkstep head so, my tips may not suit the style you're going for... for example I often use a real punchy snare for my shuffles which I doubt would be used in other softer genres :)

Hope that suits your needings!!
 
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