Introduce Clarity to Your Hi-Hats

Overhead and room recordings are incredibly challenging to mix. Regardless of the gear, room, and drum performance quality, it would be best if you made many corrections to make your cymbals sound pleasing. With this in mind, you can turn to many processing plugins available in the audio market today for help. Using these tools made it much easier to introduce clarity back to dull and hollow-sounding drum recordings, especially if we talk about cymbals, hi-hats, and sounds that belong to the high range of the frequency spectrum. The following tutorial will guide you and show practical examples of one such plugin unit. For this tutorial, we will use a couple of pre-recorded drum kits in our drum machine, RitMix, part of the SoundBridge: DAW.

DF-Clarity

The plugin we will use for this tutorial is named "DF-Clarify," and Drumforge designs it. Essentially, using a proprietary audio learning and processing algorithm creates clarity with your cymbals and hi-hats. Its main advantages are the ability to increase clarity and intelligently remove harshness in the sound of your cymbal and room mic recordings. It also offers precision tone-shaping control with the smooth and weight knobs and the ability to relax the top end of cymbal recordings with the soft controls. So, let's check out its interface in-depth and explore its control parameters.

The Interface

PROFILE

At first glance, we can say this is a simple-looking plugin with few options. But that doesn't diminish its audio processing value. In the top part of the interface, we can see a big old-fashioned VU meter and IN/OUT controls on the sides of it. There is also a BYPASS switch in the top left corner. Below, we can see the "PROFILE" tab, which enables you to select and store up to 5 unique profiles for each instance of DF-CLARIFY. You can also save and load profiles from your computer via the disk and folder icons.

CLARIFY (Learn)

The lower section contains this plugin's main parameters, and the center is reserved for the "CLARIFY" control, whose main aspect is the ability to "LEARN." By pressing this button, the learning process of DF-CLARIFY starts on an audio source. DF-CLARIFY will only learn when you are playing back audio through it. The process is complete when the yellow ring around the knob is full. Furthermore, learning can be done from one longer section or multiple shorter sections of a performance. Various education sections will create a profile average, making the algorithm more effective at targeting cymbal clarity over a whole performance and not just one section.

WEIGHT

Moving forward, we have "WEIGHT," which adjusts what crossover frequency range the clarity algorithm effects. The range is 100hz to 1khz. The clarity algorithm applies itself above this crossover point. On the opposite side, there is also a "SMOOTH" control, which defines how precise the clarity algorithm is. This allows you to make fine adjustments or general tone shaping.

RANGE and AMOUNT

In the bottom part of the DF-Clarify interface, we can see two more parameters, which are "RANGE" (Selects a specific frequency from a preset range to soften) and "AMOUNT" (Controls the amount of the applied softening). Consequently, the soften algorithm combats general cymbals to make your cymbals more pleasing.

Audio Examples

After briefly introducing DF-Clarify parameters, now is the time to check out some practical audio examples. We will first hear drum sequences unprocessed and then processed with DF-Clarify.