Hello fellow Octanauts I am a hip hop producer that uses the octatrack as my main and usually only beat machine. I was wondering if any one specifically hip hop producers know any way around the lack of human feeling and velocity in hi hats. I am well aware of the powerful lfo’s and routing them to pitch and start, but its still not quite cutting it for me. Please let me know if there are any other tips and tricks in making hi hats more acoustically human.
Thank you
I would assume varying up velocity and nudges of the hits.
play them in manually with no quantization and manually adjust the velocity to vary between near full and around 40-60% or whatever sounds nice to you. bonus points for having a second track of hats locked on the grid but very quiet.
You could set one of the LFOs to modulate the pitch and a second LFO to modulate the length then play with the swing %.
Hello I appreciate the advice, how do you adjust the velocity on the machines, I thought there wasn’t velocity on the Octatrack
Thank you! I know about the LFO trick but where is swing %?
adjust your volume, same effect.
Hold down FUNC+BANK to access the Track Trig Edit and Swing should be the third option in the menu. 55-56% is a sweet spot for me around 93-95 bpm, after that the swing become a little unworkable.
Hello, I use Digitakt but this should be the same. I set my hats on grid, then adjust velocity for each trigs, then I use microtiming to make them all a little late, usually 1/64.
Sometime I also trig lock 2 HiHat sounds, or lock a pitch or hipass on 1 / 2.
Delay + LFO on delay dry/wet is cool too
Use longer hats or cymbals, set they decay too short to play a nataraul sounding amount.
Now set lfo to random/sh, positive modulation on amp decay, now go back and forth between lfo amount and decay to get what you want.
Works for most styles Sample Length won’t work unless it’s already playing the full length of the sample, this will working even if you have them every 16th.
You could just p-lock the env decay too.
tweak each hits velocity, length/decay and microtiming individually. never use randomness or lfo’s.
ghost notes separate the men from the boys
trying using 2 slightly different hats… or make the same hat different through slight pitch, envelope and velocity adjustments
I mostly use a random lfo on decay, it also lowers the level if shorter. Random balance too.
I don’t like pitch variations for realistic hihats, but I like higher pitch otherwise.
If you want a lot of variations and miss lfos, you can resample 64 hihats with variations and create / randomize slices.
Try editing your sample to have a little bit of silence before the attack of the sound, then modulate the start parameter. Use the LFO designer for this modulation for ultimate control.
Layer with another hat that doesn’t have that modulation. Pan them at “10 and 2” o’clock, or 11 and 1.
chop up a nice breakbeat. Human feel included
On the MPC I use an open hi-hat sample with the fader assigned to decay time, then I play the hi hats in with one hand and move the fader with the other until I get a take with a good feel. The fader essentially becomes the pedal of the hi hat stand. You could definitely achieve something similar with the Octatrack. I’d say play your hi hats in without quantization and then go back and record decay time and amp volume live, and when you ahve somethign pretty close you can fine tune manually.
Nice never thought of this
What’s your case against random lfos
with eg random velocity I would find my self doing more takes, hoping for the accents to align. I want more control.