Just as an aside…..
All the live sound engineers and record producers I’ve worked with have hated super loud hi-hats.
They get in the snare mic and overheads and ruin the drum sound.
I’ve played plenty of loud, thrashy rock, and always try and balance the bass drum and snare to be louder than the hi-hats.
Even in Death Metal the hi-hats are not the most important sound on the kit.
Also, unfortunately to get the best out of e-drums you do have to adjust your technique.
I’m with you, it’s a pain in the a$$, but a sad fact.
In reality, you do not get any benefit from smashing the pads. Certainly not the same benefit you get with acoustic drums.
In fact in my experience you get less accuracy, double triggering problems and a sore wrist. You may also be shortening the life of your e-kit.
I really don’t think you should hit the hi-hat hard.
It’s a bad thing on real drums and on an e-kit it is a wasted effort.
I find playing e-drums quite difficult actually, and tend to over hit them myself.
The best results are when you treat an e-kit differently to real drums, and play less hard, concentrating on accuracy.
I only had the TD20 for a short while, but found the hi-hat the hardest thing to dial in.
I ended up editing the foot control data quite a bit. I also ended up laying in to the hi-hat pads much less heavily and got better results straight away.
It’s something worth practicing.
As I said in a much earlier post, getting the hi-hats right (between Superior and the TD20) takes a bit of tweaking.
In Pro Tools you go to the left hand track column. There you can select ‘notes’ or ‘velocity’, but also controller. So you should select foot control and have a look at the data on the track.
As an aside, having just used a TD20 with Superior, I can’t say I liked the sound of hi-hats at 127.
You can create a wash of swishy hi-hats at any velocity, and the hats at 127 sound hard and unbalanced (with the rest of the kit) to me.
It’s the opposite of on/off data.
It’s a feature where if you move a wheel on your keyboard, or the pedal of an e-drum hi-hat, data is continuously sent to the Toontrack software.
If you used the more standard on/off midi message instead of ‘continuous control’, you would only be able to trigger two hi-hat sounds (open and closed).
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