reducing the harsh metalic sound of hi-hats

[The Carpet Cleaner]

Yop

yea lquestion is in in the title.
909 clic clic clic. I want something smoother.
How
cheers

[jellycaster]

use an eq8 to tweak it, or a shaker instead

[The Carpet Cleaner]

if I use a LPF, I feel like I loose too much air. The sound become muffled.
if I use a shelving EQ, I have to go quite low to remove the harshness, so I feel like I loose again too much air.

I do a combinaison of both, a bit of shelving, a bit of LPF...
but do you have other techniques?

[ian_halsall]

use a different sample - there are millions of them out there - maybe use a shaker or tambourine

you can spend/waste a lot of time tweaking filters and evelopes and compressors...

[The Carpet Cleaner]

that's what I've been doing Ian

but I find very often that hi-hats are too bright.

[PHY6]

You could try a bitcrusher on it at let's say 12 bit...

[Fat_Stanley]

Notch EQ on the harsher frequencies? (Sweep with narrow Q boost to find culprit)

Increase the attack time / volume fade in if using audio rather than MIDI?

Compress with fast attack and longer release to bring out the splashy tails?

What genres of music are you primarily working on?

[ian_halsall]

keep looking then!

[stansharpe]

Put in simpler sampler and adjust attack and release times. Alter fades, envelopes etc. Works for me.

[Warrior Bob]

Turn them down maybe? This has worked surprisingly well for me.

[siliconarc]

what fat stanley said: notch it out by ear.
or you can look at the hihat in Spectrum, see if there's a particularly harsh freq popping out.

or yea, just turn it down.

[memes_33]

use a notch filter with a high q and crank the gain all of the way up, then sweep around the frequencies in question. find the harshest frequency, then change the gain so you are attenuating the frequency.

[Angstrom]

On hats and other cymbals such as rides and crashes I use a very subtle phaser.
First off try using a stuck phaser to "eq" the cymbal using the notches. The ableton phaser has a lot of colour and tone settings to use for this. You may want a quite dry effect setting, experiment to taste.
Once you have that dialed in the tone, use a slow shallow modulation to give subtle movement.

If done correctly and subtlety it will totally shape he hat samples and give movement without dulling and hashing the hats, and provide plenty of flexibility for the mix.

[The Carpet Cleaner]

Very good, all those advices are great, I think the best is to do a bit of all of them depending on the situation !

btw it's for electro so with compression and distortion, harsh sound of hats and symbal can quickly become annoying. Hence the post.
cheers !

[snakedogman]

Sometimes I find it also helps to increase the attack time a bit in Simpler, so that it doesn't hit so hard (and become a bit more like a shaker).