Glitching up hats with Max audio effects

We’ve created a Rack that can turn ultra-basic hi-hats into a complex rhythm. Here’s how it works…

01 >

To start, we’ve loaded up an Instrument Rack and added the HH Neat preset from DrumSynth. We’ve programmed a very rudimentary 16th-note MIDI pattern. With no velocity variation, this gives us a really simple, fairly lifeless rhythm. Time to make it a little more interesting…

02 >

First we turn to the Gated Delay effect. This lets us rhythmically step sequence delay repeats. There are two sequencer lanes – one to engage the delay, and one to reverse it. Here we’ve programmed a delay line which reverses on the ‘on’ beats. To make things a little polyrhythmic, we’ve changed the sequence length to 12 steps.

03 >

Next we use Buffer Shuffler 2.0 to add step-sequenced ‘stutter’ repeats, as well as sequence some rhythmically interesting variations to the pitch and pan position. This really gets things moving. We’ve set Dry/Wet to around 50%, so we can hear the effect but not totally lose the Gated Delay rhythm.

04 >

Next we’ve added an instance of Pitch Hack. This is a fairly ‘out there’ pitch shifting delay. We’ve created a pretty extreme pitched-down triplet delay. We’re not going to keep this engaged all the time, but dialling up the Dry/ Wet gives us a cool way to ‘break’ the rhythm for fills or breakdowns.

05 >

We’ve added the Colour Limiter to add some extra punch and crunchy saturation. Finally we’re using an instance of EQ Eight to rein in the highs a little and cut low frequencies we don’t need.

06

To finish off our Rack, we’ve mapped some Macros to control things like the length of the hats or the level of the high frequencies, and to dial in the Pitch Hack effect. Download our Rack from FileSilo in order to try it for yourself.