From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Hear every hat nuance - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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Hear every hat nuance

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- [Instructor] There are times when the drummer does some spectacular high hat work that you'd like to feature, or the groove is totally centered around it. This trick will make sure that not a single hit gets lost in your mix. First of all, let's listen to our total mix. (music plays) There are high hat sounds just fine. But, you'd be surprised at what a little bit of compression can do. Many engineers are afraid to put compression on the high hat and the cymbals. But in fact, it's a good way to keep them under control to keep all the hits the same, and to actually make sure they jump out of a mix when it's really necessary that they do so. I'm going to add a compressor, and actually I'm going to add one that I really like that happens to work great on a hat that is probably the last compressor that anybody would think about. And this is an LA 2. This is my favorite one, the silver face, even though there's a lot of different versions here. I particularly like this one because it's the one I grew up on. In the studio, we'd always have the hardware version of the LA2, so I know the sound of it, and that's why I prefer this. So anyway, let's have a listen to what it does. (drum beats with high hat cymbal) (soft rock music) Now you can hear all of a sudden it jumps out of the mix a little bit. Now it's louder that's for sure. What we'll do is we'll bring it down, but you'll still hear it has a presence that it didn't have before. (soft rock music playing) Now the next thing we can do to actually help this hat along is to add some EQ. And I usually do kind of the same thing on most hats. And the first thing is to actually roll off a lot of the bottom end. And that's to get rid of the leakage mostly from the body of the snare and especially from the kick. So have a listen. (drum beats with high hat cymbal) Now this doesn't usually affect the sound of the hat all that much because the hat mostly is filled with mids and high frequencies. Speaking of high frequencies we're going to add a little bit as well just to give it some tizz. (soft rock music playing) Okay now listen to the hat where both the EQ and the compressors bypassed and then I'll put it in gradually as we go along. (soft rock music playing) And take notice what happened. All of a sudden, we began to center in on the high hat. It became more defined and we could pick it out better in the stereo spectrum. To make the hat more present in the mix, insert a tube-type compressor like an LA2A on the hat channel. Set the amount of compression to keep the track even. Usually only a DB or two is all that's required. Now add an EQ after the compressor in the signal path. Roll off the frequencies below about 250 Hertz. Add two k for body if needed, and eight k for sparkle. Remember the different symbols and song arrangements might require different amounts and frequencies.

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