Create an Awesome Glitched Hi-Hat Sequence

Overtly electronic sounds, with bit depths, sample rates, and filtering altered on the fly and triggered by fast runs of notes, are usually the first things that come to mind when you think of glitchy drums. Today's popular music genres, such as Trap and Drum & Bass, extensively use glitched drums, especially with a focus on the hi-hats. The following tutorial will show you how to glitch the hi-hat sequence without painstakingly chopping and slicing audio events.

As usual, we've prepared an introductory sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW that contains most of the whole mix's elements. We will focus on the hi-hat as a major sound. It was initially meant to hit every eighth note. So, let us listen to it.

To spice up our hi-hat, we'll use a few effects. Since to be honest, it's a bit boring right now. We'll first use Sugar Bytes' Effectrix, which we'll place on the hi-hat channel's empty effect rack. After we open the interface of the Effectrix, the first thing to do would be to slow down the tempo of the Effectrix sequencer at 1/ 8 as we want a longer sequence.

Hi-Hat Techniques For Real Trap Music

The Effectrix sequencer is displayed as a grid, with square icons that you may position with a left mouse click and drag to the right to increase the effect's duration. The tiny squares activate the effects listed vertically on the interface's left side. Naturally, each square will be marked with a different color corresponding to the left-hand effects. At the bottom of the interface, we may adjust various parameters by clicking on some of the effects on the left (X-Loop, Reverse, Vinyl, etc.). Also, you can see in the picture below that we have made a particular sequence, including X-loop, Reverse, Tonal Delay, and Vinyl effects, to mention a few. Further, let's hear the difference between unprocessed and hi-hat processed with Effectrix.

We may also add another effect to this hi-hat pattern to make it more intriguing. MeldaProduction's MComb is a comb filter effect that may be used on various instruments, vocals, and other sounds. We've reviewed the interface and settings in some of our previous tutorials (Get Creative with Melda MComb). So we won't go over them again. We will use just one of these bands to automate the frequency and feedback parameters. You can see this in the picture below. Let's hear the difference. 

Finally, let us hear how the hi-hat is now processed with these two effects in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article, here are some more on hi-hats:

• Introduce Clarity to Your Hi-Hats
• Generate Awesome Hi-Hats with Hats by AudioThing
• Create Your Hi-Hat Sequence
• Blending Your Hi-Hat Pattern With The Width Trick
• An Alternative Way to Tune Your Hi-Hats