Hihats part 2: EQ & processing essentials

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and welcome to the second video in our hi-hats tutorial this time about processing high hands last week we saw some programming strategies on how to make some good hi-hats come out of your drum machines and now today what we're going to do is we're going to talk about how to make those sound just a little bit more professional a little bit more coherent let's immediately get into it before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog.brussels or an online music school not just a youtube channel first of all let's talk about equalization in general there are two reasons why you would equalize your hi-hats and the first one is notching out sharp resonances a lot of hi-hats and basically a lot of high percussion comes with very sibilant frequencies that go at some very sharp and specific points you may not notice these when the hi-hat is playing but when you sweep the frequency spectrum and find those frequencies and then notch them out suddenly your hi-hat is going to breathe more it's going to sound smoother more silvery more luxurious whatever you want to call it we're going to show you some examples now then the second equalization technique is going to be about tonal balance about how bright or dark you want your hi-hat to be but first let's do some frequency notching so if i'm back at this hi-hat that i programmed last week so what i've got is a 909 sample that has just been dragged into a sampler we've got the release at the maximum the sustain at the minimum and now the decay parameter tells us exactly how long the sound is going to be it sounds like this and in itself you would not necessarily think there's anything wrong with this right so what i've done already is i've already high passed it to remove a lot of the unwanted mid-range frequencies that can just clutter the low end because they're not musically interesting frequencies so let's even ignore this equalizer and instead put a fresh equalizer next to it and what we're going to do is we're going to create a bell curve we're going to set the resonance to quite high let's say about yeah five or six let's say five set the gain quite high and then we're going to let the hi-hats play and we're going to sweep this thing up and down the frequency spectrum until suddenly a frequency jumps out screaming in our ears okay and that frequency then we're going to instead we're going to reverse the gain we're going to turn it down so let's do this there we go we've got one that is immediately jumping out and screaming quite loud in our ear so let's notch that out like this don't have to go all the way down we just need to seriously de-prioritize it like we need to de-emphasize it that's all we don't need to be too drastic we don't need to do one of these crazy filter shapes like this don't worry about that don't use that just like this is fine now let's do this a few times let's find let's find the most resonant frequencies let's go there's one let's go again and once more this is maybe a bit getting a bit much but let's keep going just for the example okay now all of these incremental changes have slowly shaped the sound but notice when i turn this thing off and on how much clearer this sound sounds let's check this so what we've done is we've removed a lot of those whistling resonant frequencies that can sometimes be quite fatiguing to listen to if there are too many of them in your sounds in general there are some plugins that do this like semi-automatically like oak sounds sued which is a lovely plugin but honestly for this kind of application it's totally overkill you can just do this with the eq8 and i recommend that you do it so that you get a little bit used to the idea of finding resonant frequencies or harsh frequencies and just de-prioritizing them so cool so let's say that we've now removed the problems in our sound now we have a nice sound that we like now the question is what is the tonal balance of the sound going to be like how much highs versus lows is it going to have and for this i want to give you the model of imagine that your hi-hat has three areas to equalize i'll grab a new eq imagine that your hi-hat has a kind of a tipping point a resonant point around about five kilohertz around five thousand hertz there is a point at which your hi-hat is at its most sharp and piercing in your ear that point you can emphasize it if you think you want your hi-hat to be sharper and more aggressive you can de-prioritize that if you want your hi-hat to sound more hollow and soft but either way this is kind of a singular point that you want to find it could be a little bit higher or lower than five kilohertz depending on yours on your sample but find that point and consider how loud or quiet you want it to be then there are two other areas beyond that there's everything that's below it and everything that's above it and those are two areas that you can also control imagine for this particular sound we just keep the resonant point at zero and instead what we're gonna do is we're gonna add two more curves we're gonna add a low shelf which goes like this or like this and a high shelf which goes like this or like this everything above 5 kilohertz so like this we can now choose we can say okay our resonant point goes louder or quieter and then we can say we want to prioritize the low end and deprioritize the high end or vice versa where we deprioritize the low end and prioritize the high end what does that mean so let's say that everything below five kilohertz let's call those the dusty frequencies those are the frequencies that make a hi-hat sound more gray more dirty yeah generally more mid-rangey it kind of gives more of those like frequencies everything above 5k is kind of silvery airy kind of sound it's the very s kind of white sounding sound it's very pure but it can also be a bit overwhelming if you push it too far let me reactivate now this hi-hat first find myself where i think the resonant point more or less is and then i'm going to show you what it sounds like dark and what it sounds like bright okay let's check it out it's about there okay let's leave it at about here now let me make it dark this is a dark hi-hat compared to before now we made it darker right now let's make it brighter now it's bright with something for reference let's add the kick again bright dark bright dark so with these three handle points you can now shape your hi-hats as much as you like let's finally settle on a setting which is a slightly brighter hi-hat kind of like this now let's say that equalization is done let's move on to some reverb now for hi-hat the reverb that comes to mind immediately would be room reverb so something that's called ambient or room reverb and what that means is relatively short reverb time that just gives a little bit of a sense of an acoustic space around your hi-hats inside of ableton let's just use one of the standard reverb algorithms go into room as you can see there's an entire section there and let's go for the one called ambience fully wet it sounds like this cool and so we can choose a wetness that suits us with a lot of reverb less is more right you want not too much reverb you don't want people to actively think well there's so much reverb on these things what you want them to do is just feel like they're in a kind of a three-dimensional space however imagine you wanted to abuse this a little bit and you wanted to push this further than you probably should well that's okay but the thing that you need to then do is manage this reverb so it doesn't become ridiculously blurry and how do you do that well you need to remove the low frequencies that are coming out of it it's two ways of doing that in ableton the reverb plugin actually allows you to shape the tone of the output of the reverb so here on the diffusion network you can hit low and just remove that let me show you what it sounds like when i put it 100 wet like this there's very little low frequencies coming out of that and that's a pretty strong strategy however if you want even more control you can turn this off again and leave leave the problematic frequencies in and what you can do is you can leave your reverb 100 wet and group this into an effect rack and this effect track you can now create a second chain in this effect track the audio what it does is it hits the effect rack it'll go into both of these chains one of the chains will be completely dry so the unaffected sound will come through one of the chains will be completely wet so the reverb will be 100 wet on that and then on that reverb channel we can then put an equalizer to shape the tonal balance of that reverb so to do all of this all you have to do is open up the chains control see there's the one chain with the reverb let's actually call it that then let's create a new chain call this the dry chain and then on the reverb chain what we're going to do is we're going to put an eq right after the reverb and all we got to do is roll off everything everything above the low mids in this case because we've already high passed our hi-hat so far it probably is not going to make a huge difference but the cool thing about this is we now full control over this reverb and we can do anything that we want with it we can reduce the volume compared to the original make it fully dry again bring it in to the right level where we think it's adding a little something but it's not overwhelming the original the cool thing about this approach is you can add in crazy effects to this effects chain as well you can put crazy saturation on here you can put moving effects like a phaser or a flanger to create a layer that's sort of sitting behind your hi-hats that's related to your hi-hats but that's got movement and it's got a lot of ear candy now once you've got all of this stuff going on another thing that i recommend is adding something subtle like an lfo tool now i want to show you the lfo tool workflow that i use which is you drop an lfo tool on your channel this is the default waveform right which looks like a sidechain pumping kind of waveform and that is what we want we want this sound to pulsate slightly compared to the kick but what we want is we want something subtle we don't actually want this thing to duck completely out of the way the effect that we're going for is imagine this metaphor imagine that all your elements are floating around in the water together and every time that the kick punches there's little ripples that make every element move slightly that's what we want we don't want every time that the kick happens that the air sucks out of the room and then that everything comes back no we just want everything to slightly respond in a small creative but noticeable way to the kick and so this default is a bit too drastic what i would suggest is that you set it something like this with a more subtle shape here as well so it doesn't suck and click at that moment and then make it shallower all we want is a slight pump not a drastic side chain pump let me show you what that sounds like it's not even that noticeable because we don't have that much elements going in between the hi-hats it would be more noticeable if we put a delay on there for instance imagine on this parallel track that we've done we also put a delay imagine we put like this 16th note delay cool so now we've got a lot going on right and so when we turn off the lfo tool it stays very static now the lfo tool it creates a small little bit of movements a small little bit of backwards forwards movement which is just a kind of nuance and subtlety that makes your production richer and more considered now just for kicks let's add back in the kick and the clap and our m1 loop that we made in the last video which is just because we're working with housing high hats it's just obligatory so here we go [Music] perfect and so i hope this helps you think a little bit in a more strategic way about processing your high hands notching out resonant frequencies shaping the tonal balance adding some effects processing possibly in parallel and making everything pump slightly along with the kick but not in an exaggerated way if you put some of these techniques to good use come to our discord channel say hi share with the other producers there get feedback leave some feedback in exchange check out one of my other production videos here and until next time be good to one another stay producing and bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 95,401

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Id: VD-6DRy_b6w

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021