Techno Hi Hats

[RichardLodge]

I was just wondering if some one could give me some tips on making similar hats to this tune;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVZHq73uKbU (from 0.33)

I'm sure they're simply done but it's evading me.

They kind of have an old school straight 16ths feel.

Thanks

[AK]

Sound like 909 hats to me. HP filtered and sidechained.

Create your own groove with velocity and you can do anything like that with ease man,

[hydrogen]

Sound like 909 hats to me. HP filtered and sidechained.

Create your own groove with velocity and you can do anything like that with ease man,

+1 also add flange or chorus.

[RichardLodge]

Thanks guys, good tips.. 909, velocity, side chain, chorus.

Do you think there's much swing on them, or just the side chain/velocity that gives the groove.

Feel like I'm always on here asking groove related questions.. is pretty important in dance music I guess!:)

[markos]

definetly some velocity techniques going on here for groove and swing as well as a highpass filter. Seems as though a standard high hat sound layers over top at around 1:37 as well to increase the energy.

[tsankip]

you can also try a bit of reverb and tweak the predelay a bit and use the right filters

[Toloache]

I don't have listened to the sample, but in general, i like to made micro variations to every hit of my hat.

Start with velocities. Then, if you think about it, when you hit a real hit, you hear a lower frequency or a more resonating frequency depending on the force of your hit.

So try to stick a filter that increase the resonance of the high frequencies and bypass progressively the lower one if the hat is hit harder.

Also program different attack, decay and release for every hit. Careful programming will make the groove

[AK]

I don't have listened to the sample, but in general, i like to made micro variations to every hit of my hat.

Start with velocities. Then, if you think about it, when you hit a real hit, you hear a lower frequency or a more resonating frequency depending on the force of your hit.

So try to stick a filter that increase the resonance of the high frequencies and bypass progressively the lower one if the hat is hit harder.

Also program different attack, decay and release for every hit. Careful programming will make the groove

I'm not into using hi hats too much as I always think things sound better if I substitute them for shakers but I have used a similar approach to get a pattern I am happy with. If I was using a sampled hat, I'd just have a single open hat with enough decay length to work with and copy the sample 4 or 5 times in my sampler and map it chromatically up my keyboard.

Then I'd start out making adjustments to each of the same sample, the open hat would also become a closed hat by applying and envelope and once I had various legths assigned, I'd set each individual level, so hats that would be lower in volume in the pattern, I'd move in a little on the attack time to make them softer and I'd also apply a low pass filter to these to ensure the softer hats have less high frequency content and maybe make some minor pitch tweaks depending on the sound too. After getting a balance between the sounds, I'd send them all to a choke group where the closed hats cut off the open. You can also do the same thing but map them to the same key/zone and set individual velocity ranges so only a certain sound would get triggered depending on the velocity set.

The reason I used just one source sound is that I often felt like things just sounded like a bunch of samples that didn't belong together, by using one single open hat and manipulating it slightly, you can get a cohesive kit that doesn't sound like randomly chosen samples.

Of course it's totally different if you are synthesizing your own or whatever but I'd do that if I were using a sample as a way to get hat patterns I preffered.