fatten up and thicken

[biolet]

any advice on how to fatten up and thickin digital hihats, cymbals?

 

[Dillin Quent]

Use a maximizer, compression, and possbily double the hits.

 

[2nice]

try out a lot of fx and see what your ear likes. for that type of thing, i often use izotope trash, which has a good tape-saturation-modelling stage as well as good filters.

Use a maximizer, compression, and possbily double the hits.

since hi hats dont have the most intense dynamic range, you dont really need to worry about compressing them on their own.

 

[Buddha]

A short slap back delay panned slightly off to the side will do this...a distortion unit of tube setting with careful use of the damage amount can do this too...

 

[2nice]

a distortion unit of tube setting with careful use of the damage amount can do this too...

cosign... "the tube sound" may be what youre looking for

 

[Morning_Star]

I decided to help since I dissagree with pretty much every post so far. Cymbals DO NOT NEED TO BE FAT. Don't worry about making everything fat like it's the new trend. Just pan them to the right or left to add balance and TURN THEM DOWN so that they are barely noticed. They are glue for your arragement changes and for balance in your patterns. Hi-hat's are fine thin. They are thin sounding naturaly. You could use an exciter but very sparingly. That's will add sparkle to the high end. The low/low-mid range is where it is good to sound "fat". In this case find a free plug-in called Baxxpander. Use a very slight amount of reverb on the cymbals too.

 

[PrinceOfDarkness]

I decided to help since I dissagree with pretty much every post so far. Cymbals DO NOT NEED TO BE FAT. Don't worry about making everything fat like it's the new trend. Just pan them to the right or left to add balance and TURN THEM DOWN so that they are barely noticed. They are glue for your arragement changes and for balance in your patterns. Hi-hat's are fine thin. They are thin sounding naturaly. You could use an exciter but very sparingly. That's will add sparkle to the high end. The low/low-mid range is where it is good to sound "fat". In this case find a free plug-in called Baxxpander. Use a very slight amount of reverb on the cymbals too.

Very true, BUT..

fx's on cymbals, if used NOT in an acoustic piece, can create a really killer sound.
Like in hard trance per example, sometimes i will add a sh*tload of fx's on reversed cymbals:
I'll stretch them, add a flanger, a chorus, delay & verb, even a De-esser with abused settings, then add some sparkle back in the high end, creating a really nice swhooshing reversed cymbal.

not sure if this is what he was looking for (probably not), but i do add alot of fx's sometimes, but not on hiphop tracks. there is no limit to creativity.