As the rhythmic and tonal glue that binds the kick and snare, hi-hats are a crucial element in the vast majority of drum grooves. Here are half a dozen practical and creative hi-hat programming tips for ensuring that yours are up to scratch.

Keep it real

You don’t have to be a drummer to program realistic ‘live’ hi-hat tracks in MIDI (although it certainly helps!), but you do need to be aware of a couple of inescapable physical considerations. First, fast 16th-note hats are usually played using both hands, with the right hand moving quickly to the snare on the backbeat; so if your drums match that description, don’t place hi-hats on top of snare hits.

Second, with eighth-note hi-hat patterns, even in the most energetic drum tracks, a drummer will semi-consciously emphasise the beat, playing offbeat hits slightly quieter than on-beat ones; so don’t set all your hi-hat notes to the same velocity, and use ’round robin’ sample sets if available.

And third, be sure to assign your open and closed hi-hats to the same voice or ’choke’ group, so that closed hats cut off open hats, just as they can’t help but do in the real world. This will already be set up in any dedicated virtual drum kit instrument, so you probably only need to think about it when building your own multisampled kits.

When programming electronic beats, on the other hand, you can ignore all such advice and go wherever the mood takes you. We would still caution against making your hats too busy or irregular, however, unless you’re working in trap, where fast hi-hat triplets and rolls are part and parcel of the genre.

Get to know the articulations

The hi-hat is a more nuanced instrument than it at first appears, and high-end virtual drum kits will represent those nuances across numerous articulations that should be fully exploited to maximise the realism of your programmed lines.

As you’re no doubt aware, the pedal on a hi-hat stand brings the cymbals at the top together, for two distinct basic tones when struck with sticks: the tight, short closed hit, and the splashy, sustained open sound that’s cut short when the pedal is re-engaged (via the aforementioned choke group). Between those two points, though, your multisampled kit should provide a few degrees of ‘openness’, which are well worth exploring. The nature of the sticking also needs to be considered: a real drummer might alternate eighth-notes between the tip of the stick on the bow (surface) of the top cymbal and the shoulder of the stick on the edge, both of which will be available in any decent virtual kit.

Finally, you’ve got the softer sound of the two cymbals being brought together without the involvement of the sticks, which is often overlooked by the inexperienced programmer. Add this ‘pedal’ articulation on the offbeat whenever the ride cymbal comes in to play, or on the beat during fills – it may be barely audible in the mix, but take it away and you’ll immediately hear the difference.

Music and movement

The hi-hats in house, techno and EDM are characteristically repetitive, placed (traditionally open) on the offbeats to sit between the kick drum hits on all four beats of the bar, with or without quieter (traditionally closed) hits on the beat. However, that doesn’t mean you should just grab the nearest one-shot sample, throw it on a track and call it a day – there’s endless scope for embellishment within that basic structure. For starters, try throwing in a different hi-hat sound at the end of every one-, two- or four-bar phrase: this could be a subtle variation on the main hit, or a radical departure from it – a closed hat at the end of a run of open hats, perhaps.

Then there are various parameters that can be continuously changed over time to keep a hi-hat line interesting, such as filter cutoff, volume, pan, pitch and envelope release time, and effects including delay, flanging and reverb. Simply draw or record an automation curve for your chosen control over a loop of whatever length works for the track, or all the way through it from start to finish. Again, whether to keep these changes gentle and undulating or have them leap around all over the place is entirely up to you!

Stereo hats

Unlike the kick and snare drums, which should pretty much always be positioned at the dead centre of the soundstage, hi-hats can be panned around the stereo field without compromising the mix. Positioning them slightly to the left or right of centre, with a complementary ‘top’ percussion part (a shaker or tambourine, say) balancing them out on the opposite side, is common practise; and repetitively panning them a short distance around the centre point can work well in electronic styles.

Hats are also highly amenable to stereo widening, either using any plugin that incorporates a ‘width’ control, or by taking advantage of the Haas effect. This is the perceived widening of a sound that results from panning two identical copies of it left and right, then delaying one of them by up to 40ms. For embiggening hi-hats, play around in the range of 5-20ms.

Make room for the snare

Most of the time, the snare drum and hi-hats within an acoustic or electronic drum kit will coexist quite happily, but if you find that the hats are dominating the snare in the higher frequencies, duck them out of the way using a sidechain-enabled compressor or dynamic EQ on the hi-hat channel, keyed off the snare. A compressor will attenuate the whole signal every time the snare hits, while a dynamic EQ – FabFilter Pro-Q 3 or Waves F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ, to name a couple of the best – can be set to only duck selected frequency ranges, making it the more precise of the two options.

The Haas widening technique described above, it should be noted, is also great for separating hats and snares, as it places each in its own space within the stereo field. Obviously, this won’t work as well as ducking on mono playback systems, though.

Rein in harshness

Due to the essentially sibilant nature of their sound, hi-hats often exhibit excessive harshness that needs to be brought under control using equalisation. If the part in question is too dynamically variable for conventional EQ to deal with satisfactorily – ie, a hefty cut to those ear-bothering frequencies works well on louder hits but proves too subtractive on quieter strokes – pull out that dynamic EQ again, but leave it set to the default internal sidechain, so that the cuts deepen as the input gain increases.

Alternatively, get an ‘intelligent’ or ‘adaptive’ EQ – Oeksound Soothe 2, Sonible Smart:EQ 3or Sound Theory Gulfoss, for example – to do the hard work for you. A recent and quietly game changing music technology development, these wondrous widgets use AI-based algorithms to automatically iron out problematic resonances, and can do wonders for abrasive hats, whether inserted directly or strapped over the drums bus.

Do you have any hi-hat-related tricks to share? Let us know in the comments.