Process Your Hi-Hats by Using RitMix

Creating hi-hat patterns that are both interesting and rewarding may be challenging for even the most experienced music producers who program drum grooves. The following tutorial will show you some ideas on processing your hi-hats using RitMix.

As usual, we prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most elements of a full mix, including a simple hi-hat pattern made in the RitMix Drum Machine by SoundBridge. Let's take a listen to it.

Hi-hats can sound processed significantly faster than other drum beat elements because they fall inside a narrow frequency band. Therefore, they easily suffer from excessive saturation, EQ, compression, or, in general, overprocessing. It's better to start with subtle processing and tweaking methods to prevent this.

We will touch on simple tweaks that work wonders. In addition to them, remember to rest your ears when mixing. After taking a break from the mix for ten to fifteen minutes, it's easier to detect the ringing and harshness brought on by over-processing.

Let's hear our hi-hat sequence solo.

Process Your Hi-Hats

The hi-hat pattern sounds too clean and lifeless as it is. We'll switch to the RitMix interface and focus on the Amp/Pitch editor to fix this. Let's start with the amp envelope, using slightly shorter decay and sustain settings.

After that, we'll move on to the pitch envelope and humanizer. Here, we will reduce the semitones by -10 while adjusting the envelope amount and decay time slightly.

At this point, humanizing the panning will be enough to feel a much more dynamic sequence already. Let's hear how this sounds.

Our hi-hat pattern will now be colored with an additional bit-crusher effect to complete the processing. This is a beneficial effect to process audio material such as cymbals and hi-hats. It can introduce grittiness and cut off unwanted high frequencies in a different and often more pleasing way than standard equalizers. Let's set the downsampling at 4.

Finally, let's hear our processed hi-hat sequence in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on drum processing, here are some more on the same subject:

• Add Texture to Your Drums
• Add Edge to Your Drums
• Create Epic Cinematic Drums
• Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix