I'm curious about how other members of this forum process their hi hats.
some truly interesting questions here
How about the panning?
Do you pan the closed hats and the open hats in the same direction?
yes but then I think like a drummer and so always pan according to where I think of the instruments as being within my playing field - I even go so far as to pan across the whole 100L-C-100R field and then sub group the kit back to a stereo buss and fix the panning so that it is 50L-C-50R on that buss - Ii.e. I use the wider field and then scale it back in the buss
Do you pan them to left or to the right?
I always pan from an audience perspective of a live performance of the kit - so for me unless the drummer is a lefty the hats get panned about 45R; probably 43R for the closed hat and 47R for the open hat (the sound from hats when open squirts out the back first before the upper hat fully lifts off the bottom one) - if a lefty then we swap the pan direction but keep the movement the same
yes but only a very little - and usually tied to a larger approach to room/space reverb - i.e. used for spatial cues within a defined room/space more than anything else
live hats maybe, sampled hats hardly ever but it is all relative to the needs of the current track
hardly ever use any time-modulation effects like chorus or flanging or phasing - though phasing is a favourite for that mid-70's Doobie Brothers/Fleetwood Mac sound
Has anyone gotten any good results with layering 3-4 hi hats on top of each other?
I try not to layer like that, preferring to find a single good sound - if I can't then I will re-sample the aggregate sound as a single sound complete with creative eq
How about the velocity of your hats? How much variation do you like to create in between the velocities?
the secret sauce applies to this one - human variation in velocities is about +/- 5 so I have a general random function that will apply this within a dynamic level range - I apply the randomisation at least 5 times, as many as 19 times (5/7/11/13/17/19 are all possibilities and are all prime numbers) to obtain a truly random distribution of values.
Then it may require further tweaking to add in accents to specific hits in the sequence
- an accent should be +5 to the current velocity value
- this breaks the random nature of the surrounding values and so stands out during playback as the required accent
If I need to ramp up or down the dynamic level I prefer to use a linear increase/decrease for the line until the new dynamic level is reached and then apply the same randomisation and accenting tweaks as described above
All of this can take hours to get right and may be better done using a pad based controller (more like the octapad/kat-pads hit with real drumsticks) or an electronic kit to play in real time