Damn loud hi-hats, and that washy cymbol effect.

[eeldip]

dont foget that a decent pair of dark, quiet 13" or even 12" highhats are a great investment for a studio.

they solve many problems... and drummers arent usually too upset when you replace their high hats.. not like replacing a bass drum pedal or anything.

my favorite recording high hat set up right now cost me $35. the 12" wuhan splash/china pack... the china on bottom the splash on top. nice trashy sound. super super quiet. when they are miced--- beautiful.

[deadair]

yes i have thought of buying another pair of hihats but in browsing i realize there are so many different ones that i feel its too much of a crap shoot, suggestions for quiet/dark hihats would be welcome as well.

[eeldip]

personally i dig sabian HHX hats. pretty quiet and dull.

but there are quieter ones and louder ones, and some of it depends on age and use. hats are pretty unique little things.

i say you should head over to some store in MASS (are you near a daddy's junky music) bring your high hats, or borrow some offensive pair, and hit a bunch of cymbals... pick the ones that dont bug you in the same way....


oh and if you are thinking of spending no money, a little duct tape on the inside of a high hat (on top and bottom) can do wonders. for a while this was the way i dealt with my quick beats. which are by the way, a very annoying pair of hats for recording.

[tmix]

Most all the suggestions are good in their own way. I would like to offer up my own solution.
I own a bunch of small light cymbols which you may not be willing to run out and buy, but they honestly help balance things out. (zildjian 13" A mastersound hi-hats are the best all around in my opinion).The lighter crashes flash easily and dont wash for a long time.
I still only use 4 mics to mic my kit in a 12' by 20' room. I use a fig 8 condensor on the snare to minimize hat bleed, a beta 52 on kick, and 2 cadE100s or AKG C1000s about 18" off the ground in front of the kit pointing at the the toms (more toward the bottom of the toms). I balance the cymbol mix by how close to the toms I place the mics. It really works very well and it makes it very easy to get a workable stereo mix because the snare and kick come up in the center (with the hat) and the toms can be panned with minimal placement leakage from the snare.

Works for me!

[corinpills]

I'll concur with Rog simply because of my experience with him recording our most recent album. The one before this was done at Fort Apache and all we heard from the mix session was "that gioddamned hi hat!"- poor Matt Ellard had bald spots from pulling his hair out. For months after, every recording person I ran into said "Yaeh, i head abouyt your hi hat problems". The stuff we tracked at Tremelo with Roger does not have this problem. Same drummer, same hi hats, same stupid bass player wanting everything louder, louder, louder (that would be me), but the overall balance of the kit is much more natural.

Plus he gives a good foot rub.

[CDSager]

I know that this breaks the sacred rule of pure recording, but I don't really care. I almost always carve out somewhere around 400 hz on my overheads and hi hat. This usually will take out that annoying trashy sound and will help the cymbals sit better in the mix. They can be louder but they won't cover up other important elements in the mix. (all too often i hear mixes where the the guitars are covered up by trashy cymbals.)


Rock and Roll

[JES]

400hz? Really?

--JES

[CDSager]

Hell yeah 400 hz. Get rid of it and you will be pleasantly suprised.

[KingOlaf]

Because cardiod mics reject noise from the back you can greatly reduce the amount of hi-hat bleed into the snare mic by making sure the back of the snare mic is pointed at the hi-hat.

[deadair]

i've tried rolling some obnoxious frequencies out of overheads before, but it does make me wary as it always seems the over hjeads should be the untouched eq. i'll have to check out 400hz and see what happens.

[d franko]

I read somewhere else about using a de-esser to rid of the hi-hat... interesting.