Blending Your Hi-Hat Pattern With The Width Trick
Last Edited: Dec 1, 2023
The hi-hat has a riding force that floats above the grounded kick and snare hits. No matter the genre, well-produced and mixed hi-hats can make the difference between a professional and an amateur mix. There are many ways and approaches to blending the hi-hats into the mix. In the following tutorial, we will focus on one of them.
As usual, we have prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It contains all the essential elements of a drum section. Let's have a listen to it.
The drum sequence sounds good and already includes the main hi-hat sequence. However, there is room to add another hi-hat pattern to experiment with width and other parameters. All this is in order to spice the groove up.
Let's start by selecting some hi-hat samples and building a simple pattern. Here is how that sounds solo and in the context of the whole mix.
Increase the Width of the Hi-Hat Pattern
To increase the height of the hi-hat sequence above, we will use MicroShift by Soundtoys. MicroShift works excellent for widening the stereo image of incoming audio. It's often used on vocals, guitars, and synths but can also give interesting results on drum elements.
As you can see in the picture below, we didn't apply any Detune or Delay movement. In this case, our pattern gets pretty broad with the Mix parameter set to maximum. Other than that, we have chosen the style II algorithm. Let's hear the difference.
Final Touches with a Frequency Shifter
Once we're satisfied, we can do one more thing better: blend the new hi-hat sequence into the overall mix. We'll do this by adding a frequency shifter. This is a beneficial effect for drum tuning, which was covered in depth in one of our previous tutorials. Our tool of choice will be the MFreqShifter by Melda Production. Here, we will increase the Shift parameter until we reach a pitch that blends well with the other elements of our drum groove. Let's have a listen.
Finally, let's listen to the whole mix with our newly processed hi-hat sequence.
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