As the least upfront element of the drum kit, the humble hi-hat might not seem like something that requires a great deal of engineering attention, but spending quality time on this most innocuous of instruments can make all the difference to the groove and high-frequency presence of your mix. Here, then, are five tactics to help you on your way.

Filtering And EQ

While the commonly held belief that every instrument in a mix must be high-pass filtered to reduce overall rumble and excess low-end energy is a bit of a misconception, few would argue that shaving the bottom frequencies off your hi-hats isn’t almost invariably a good idea. Hats can put out a fair bit of unnecessary ‘whump’ along with the desired ‘tick’ and ‘chick’ – some of it coming from the cymbals, some from the hi-hat stand and pedal – so don’t hesitate to get rid of it with a high-pass filter. Set the cutoff frequency just below the point at which it starts to alter the sound significantly as you raise it, which will likely be somewhere between 200 and 400Hz.

With said filter in place, further equalisation should be applied to bring out the best in your hats and position them comfortably within the context of the rest of the drum kit (preventing clashes with the snare, especially) and the mix as a whole. The exact settings required will come entirely down to the specifics of the track, whether you’re dealing with a directly miked signal or overheads, and the character of the cymbals themselves, but if you run into difficulties getting those all-important high and high-mid frequencies under control using your usual static EQ, consider bringing in a de-esser, or a dynamic or automatic EQ such as Soundtheory’s Gullfoss or Oeksound’s Soothe 2, either of which can work literal wonders when it comes to suppressing resonances and harshness.

Levelling And dynamics

Being transient-heavy and residing at the higher end of the frequency spectrum, hi-hats can quite easily become over-dominant in the mix if not kept in check; but get them nicely balanced in relation to the kick and snare, and – as long as the whole kit is then levelled appropriately and assuming you’re dealing with a consistent performance – that should be easily avoided. One thing to bear in mind, though, is that there are essentially four ‘modes’ of hi-hat – closed, half open, open and pedalled – any number of which might appear in a given track, and all potentially differing quite widely in volume level, depending on the skill and style of the drummer. As with any other source material, compression and/or automation are your go-tos for resolving wayward dynamics; keying the sidechain input of a compressor to the snare can work wonders for alleviating the aforementioned hat/snare masking; and transient shapers can be highly effective for contouring open and half-open hats, enabling microscopic sculpting of the attack and sustain components. Hi-hat spill into the snare mic can prove problematic, too, but that’s often easily nuked by simply bunging a gate on the snare channel.

Panning And Spatialising

With the kick and snare drums placed firmly at the centre of the mix, panning the hi-hats off to one side by a few degrees (perhaps with a partnering shaker, tambourine or other high-frequency percussion instrument on the opposite side) can add a beneficial sense of width to the drums without knocking them off balance or being distracting. Deciding whether or not to add reverb to your hats will be guided by the style of the track and the amount of room ambience present in the drum mix, but if you do elect to take that option, err on the side of caution with the decay time and dry/wet mix, as you don’t want to compromise the punch of closed or pedalled hats, or overblow the slashing sustain of open or half-open hats. If in doubt, leave it out – you should certainly never feel obliged to apply any reverb to hi-hats at all, even if the accompanying snare drum and toms are steeped in the stuff.

Add Groove To Electronic Hats With Delay

If you’re working with a MIDI-programmed or step-sequenced drum machine, a great way to elevate a humdrum hi-hat line is to run it through a delay effect, adding extra hits in between the programmed ones. A basic stereo delay (with onboard filter) is the default option here, allowing the left and right sides to be timed independently – keep them synced to musical note values for rigid temporal accuracy, or set them in milliseconds to precisely shape the groove. The more sparse the MIDI note pattern triggering the hats, the more space you have to play around with the added hits by raising the delay feedback and manipulating the filter, so experiment with thinning the notes out to that end. And even more interesting things can happen if you upgrade that simple stereo delay to something more ambitious.

Although this particular trick is primarily applicable to electronic hats, as the extra hits will sound obviously cloned and thus somewhat unnatural, there is of course nothing stopping you from trying it on live hi-hat parts as a special effect.

Brighten Up Dull Hi-Hats With A Noise Or Sample Layer

If, despite your best EQing efforts, your hats just aren’t cutting through due to a lack of brightness and/or high-mid weight, layering in a second, sampled one or a low-level burst of white (or other) noise may well prove sufficiently restorative. For layering (or even fully substituting) secondary hi-hat sounds, drum replacement solutions such as UVI Drum Replacer and Toontrack Superior Drummer 3’s Tracker module use your recorded audio track as the trigger for one or more samples that can then be mixed in to taste. And Cableguys’ NoiseShaper does the same thing for noise, mixing any of a wide variety of envelope following or audio triggered noise samples in with the source hats. Alternatively, you can just use your DAW’s ‘audio to MIDI’ conversion function to extract a perfectly aligned MIDI clip from your hi-hat track, then aim it at any synth or sampler.

Share your most relied-upon hi-hat mixing techniques in the comments.