From the course: Music Production Secrets

Taming Hi-Hats - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Music Production Secrets

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Taming Hi-Hats

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- [Voiceover] Many times drummers play their high hats a little too forcibly and the resulting sound bleeds in to every mic on a kit and kind of overwhelms the drum sound. The biggest problem is with the overhead mics, if you have a stereo pair above the kit or in front and the high hats are dominating the other instruments in the drumset like the cymbals and the snare, things that you're trying to bring out. So I'm going to show you a few tricks that might help you fix this problem to a certain degree. First of all, let's take a listen to what we got here. So that's a stereo pair of mics over a drumset and let's go and just try it first with a simple one band EQ with a little notch in it. You can look for the frequencies that are really bothering you. Do a little tight cut. I do a lot of work with the cue the how wide, you know? A lot of times that change in the cue of that EQ cut can really help like dial in what you're trying to get rid of and not affect as much the other stuff around. So that kind of harsh top up there, just around seven kilohertz or so, is what we're trying to cut there and that can help in the mix. You're taking a little life out of the drums, but you're also helping them fit in the mix. You've got to think of it that way. It's a, always a little bit of a trade off. Another way to work with this is to try a DSER and this is kind of crazy. I have this mass EDSER here and I'll show you what this is going to do. Check that out. When you adjust the frequency on this, it's kind of cool because you can hear what you're removing. So you can dial it in just to cut the high hat, not so much the snare. I run on it on the band split mode around here. Instead it would be compressing or reducing the whole mix, the whole frequency band. This just reducing the band of frequency that we've selected see that? It's kind of weird. That restores it. And you can also dial in a little less. You can go and blend it with the regular signal. So you could go kind of heavier but then dial this back. It's just simple incremental trade offs that you can do where you can adjust these kind of tracks, reduce a little bit of the high hat and bring them back in and get a better sound for your mix.

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