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Whenever I try to make hat patterns like this they always sound real choppy and rigid. I realise a big part of getting the patterns sounding good would be to use airy light hats but I still have trouble. Any tips for sequencing these patterns?

Record them in by hand rather than using the grid placement in your DAW. You'll get a more human feel in terms of the loose placement of them, and also will have natural fluctuations in velocity.

main thing to experiment with would be the velocity from what i hear. wubs tip is true as well, but not always necessary to achieve swing in a track

It's less about swing and more about velocity, a small amount of swing and getting the velocities right is they. Think about which hits you're accenting.

Weird, for some reason I don't hear a single hi hat in the tracks you just posted, all I hear is shakers. But yeah, velocity and sidechaining is imported, lots of sidechain in these

thekuku wrote:Weird, for some reason I don't hear a single hi hat in the tracks you just posted, all I hear is shakers. But yeah, velocity and sidechaining is imported, lots of sidechain in these

Yeh I should've said shakers really

Suprised noones mentioned delay

benjaminC wrote:Suprised noones mentioned delay

Yeah delays work really well for this. Not really related directly to producing but when mixing tunes putting a delay on the high end is a good way to pick up the pace of a track since it delays the high hats of the track.

well, first off, i recommend listening to a load of old 2-step tunes best highs ever. and benny ill from horsepower, no drums like his

and re. those videos;
first one just sounds like a loop (not manually programmed) layered with some other stuff
second one is just a lot of lyayers of shakers

personally, i normally do a few layers of frequencies of highs, for a full and shuffley sound. i also normally give everyhting its own little frequency band, obv some overlap is okay but too much and some stuff is just gonna get drowned out and become inaudible to the point that it might as well not even be there

anway ususally i do

5k - 20k : tamborines / hi passed reverb / tape hiss
10k - 3/4k : some shakers n shit
3/4k : onwards - hi hats and that (if im doing house i also like to use a shaker 1 hit detuned minus one octave instead of a hi hat - gotta find the right sample for it though)

also sounds nice and shuffley if u do solid 16th notes of a singel shaker or tamb hit (so its like constant), and then add a flanger to it. i also like to add stereo shaper so the shuffley flange shaker, so it only plays on sides and not mid , and have it kinda low in the mix, for added background shuffle

also shuffle rule #1 is adding a good few additional ghost notes, of varying velocities, including ones that are so small theyre barely audiable. all off grid n shit

u could hyst take the tambourine line from the think break and layer that in

hope that makes sense cos im coicidentally pretty while talking about all these highs

i see you're an ableton user. write your hat patterns with the triplet grid

Try them at different pitches with fluctuating envelope automation...try ping pong delay in Ableton too

benny has some good advice
i tend to use a lot of shakers, some hats, sometimes ill just have a premade loop and add my own hats on top of it
samples which are really good are ones with more than one hit in them, like a shaker hit where it plays 2 hits rather than one, if yoiu use a mix of them and single hits then you can get a nice shuffle.
also knocking things off grid helps but isnt that important imo. you can also set the sample start point in ya sampler a bit later than normal so that its slightly delayed, effectively does the same as knocking em off grid
also good to chop up breaks and use little sections of them for this kinda thing

FL has a swing function, it offsets hits by a fraction of a step here and there.

Swing, syncopation, velocity, different hat sounds working together... you can even create a pattern of 16s hats and then side chain with the kick so u get gapped patterns going.

Surprised no one's mentioned this, it was a staple link when people used to ask this question when I visited this forum a lot: http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.co.uk ... -jazz.html

I haven't seen that article in awhile. It's good.