Tricks To Make Your Trap Hi-Hats More Interesting!

Hey Producer,
This blog is all about quick-fire tips for trap hat patterns.

Almost instantly recognizable, trap hat patterns are fast and they’re rhythmically complex, so it takes a bit of practice to get them right.

There are four rhythmic ideas in trap hats that are its unique markers, making it different from old-school hip hop. These are triplets, rolls, pitch, and swing. Getting a good grip on when, where, and how to use these techniques in trap hat patterns, will help you make nice hard-hitting and unique trap hats for your beats.

Let’s look at this quickly and simply:
Triplets is what gives the trap hats that crazy rhythmic quality. What triplets do is flip the beat by adding an extra note to create rhythmic patterns that are felt in threes instead of twos. Ta ta ta, ta ta ta instead of ta ta, ta ta. Go on say those ‘tas’ out loud. You get what we mean! The rolls. This is the ‘flare’ of trap hats. Often people find trap hat patterns a bit random or erratic. But if you listen carefully, you’ll hear what the producer is accenting. These hat rolls are used to accentuate the beat and create interesting and complex rhythms.

Rolls are used to embellish the triplet idea, by increasing speed by doubling or tripling their note value. There are a lot of ways to use rolls to accentuate different beats. One of the most common ways to make a roll stand out is to use Pitch Shifts. The Pitch shift will adjust and shape the tone of the hats up or down, creating all sorts of ear candy! 

Swing is used in trap hats to create a good ‘human’ feel or the patterns can sound quite ‘mechanical’ and ‘machine’ like. We’ve asked Bronwen from www.rapponline.net to walk us through some techniques to use when making a trap hat pattern.

Let the good times roll!
The r-loops team.

USED SAMPLE PACK (True Samples - TRAP Control): https://r-loops.com/sample-pack/true-samples/trap-control/5600