7 Best Hi Hat Mics for Live Sound & Studio Recording

The P170 has a switchable dB pad, making it somewhat versatile in its pickup frequencies. This means it can handle fairly loud levels of input, a great feature for the hard-hitters out there.

The response is fantastic and it produces an extremely clear tone, especially when used as a dedicated hi-hat microphone. The perfect words to describe it would be snappy and detailed.

The “producer” term for this particular sound and clear attack is called "transient response." It's extremely important for hi-hats because many of your favorite drum grooves — from either classic recordings or newer productions — go through multiple layers of compression and even some distortion.

When this type of processing is applied to drums to capture the sound of modern music, what usually happens is that much of the attack gets compressed and condensed. This makes the drums sound glued together in a very particular way. You can hear this clearly on a track like Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk."

They're obviously going for a very '70s disco sound, but you can tell it's a live drummer. The hi-hat is very defined yet feels like part of the groove, not a separate entity.

This is very important when choosing a microphone to capture your hi-hat. Depending on your room and your hi-hat, you can get very different sounds with different microphones. Keep this in mind when testing various mics.

On this AKG, I love that the response and overall frequency range is quite transparent and neutral yet has that classic bit of AKG crispness and boost to the high-end. That's always been a signature sound of AKG and something that has been very popular when choosing their mics for drum sounds, particularly hi-hats.

Even with that boost though, it makes your hi-hats sound exactly like they do in the room you’re recording them in. While that may seem obvious, many mics don’t have this result. So, it’s great that these ones do.

Another reason I like capturing slightly bright mics with a very natural-sounding flat response is that I can do a lot with them later on in both the production phase and especially mixing.

One creative trick that I like to do with hi-hats is use tape compression plug-ins, like the Universal Audio Studer A800 plugin or the Waves J37 tape emulation.

Both of these are Studer machines, except the Waves J37 was modeled after the tape machine at Abbey Road Studios where the Beatles recorded. The Beatles achieved some of the best hi-hat sounds anyone had heard at that time.

Ever since then, that tape machine has been a critical part of producing great hi-hat sounds.

The issue with tape, though, is that it can potentially darken your sound because it naturally acts as a warmer for your high frequencies. Therefore, the slightly brighter you can capture your hi-hats, the better off you are when pushing the tape sound. That's another plus to using a mic like this on hats.

The construction of the mic is very durable and dependable. You could do some heavy traveling and the mic would hold up just fine. However, the mic clips are lacking on the durability side. They could definitely be a bit more rugged.

I feel that the low price of this mic is perfect for hi-hat applications. If you’re on a budget, you should invest more into your overheads so that you get a good overall sound. I’d always suggest getting something a bit cheaper for your hi-hats, and this AKG P170 is one of the best options in that situation.

Overall, it’s a great starter mic for anyone who is just getting into recording or anyone on a tight budget.

The second reason it’s such a great live mic is that it has an adjustable roll-off bass and pad which are fantastic for cutting of pops, clicks, and reducing the risk of feedback. This makes it a trusted microphone that will work wonderfully in most situations.

To any of you not familiar with using pads on microphones, they act as a way to lower the headroom sensitivity so you push the mic harder. Meaning, you can use it on louder sources without clipping as easily.

That's why this microphone is excellent for hi-hats because you can get it very close to the source to get that intimate hi-hat sound without getting any of the harmonic distortion you would get from mics without a pad.

It also helps when you're plugging it into a preamp — especially a really nice vintage pre or maybe a tube preamp — because it allows you to push the input of the preamp harder, which in turn also colors the sound a little bit in a very nice way. This is particularly effective if you're using something like the Warm Audio WA-MPX1 tube preamp, which also has a tape saturation circuit built-in.

Capturing this Rode mic with the pad engaged and then boosting that output through the Warm Audio pre makes for a delightful and slightly vintage crunchy hi-hat sound. Perfect for modern pop and funk recordings.

The low roll-off also helps reduce proximity effect and any other leakage that could muddy the sound when you're close-miking a hat.

The mic itself has a very modern look to it. It’s long and black, giving it a smooth aesthetic next to your drums. It’s a permanently polarized condenser that is tough and sturdy, ready to be used in high-intensity situations.

It works wonderfully as a studio microphone as well. However, you’ll get the most use out of it in live playing situations.

The actual tone of the mic is very natural with a slight crisp on the top-end. This is great for picking up hi-hats as you’re often going to want that crispiness to shine through.

In studio situations, you would often resort to using a tube mic to pick up a tone similar to what you can get with the combination of this mic and a nice preamp.

Another advantage of this microphone that works well for studios is that it's very quiet and doesn't produce much self-noise, which means you can boost it quite a bit with nice compressors and even harmonic drive enhancing plugins like the Waves Abbey Road saturator.

These types of harmonic exciters, as producers like to call them, work wonders for smoothing out and adding excitement to the high-end harmonics produced from the hat itself. You'd be shocked at how much saturation actually goes into a modern hit drum groove that you hear on the radio.

One drawback of the mic is that it’s quite heavy for its size. Although that adds to the durability of it, it detracts from the portability.

I think the best way to describe this mic in a relatable way is to compare it to the Shure SM58. The SM58 is a vocal mic, and the Rode M3 is very similar. However, it has all the qualities that make it a good instrument mic as well.

I found that it is much more sensitive, so you can place it quite far away from the hi-hats and still get a good tone from them. Although, you’d need to be careful not to place it too close to the other drums in your setup to stop it from picking their sounds up as well.

The Rode M3 wouldn’t be my first choice hi-hat mic in a studio environment. However, I think live gigging settings are where it shines through the most in terms of practical use and quality.

With that being said, the natural-sounding response is great for hi-hats as well. It has a cardioid pickup pattern which is great at isolating single sound sources, meaning it will pick up your hi-hat notes without having any of the other drums bleed into the sound.

This is an incredible microphone to use for studio recordings that need to be extremely pristine and captured in an elegant fashion. With other cheaper mics, engineers have described ways that you can use their qualities — even if they are flaws in technical terms — to actually add vibe and color to your hi-hats.

When you have a microphone like this SM81, it's sometimes great to use it for its greatest strength, which is its ruler-flat, very detailed natural sound. In a way, it reminds me a little bit of some of the Royer ribbon mics I've used, except not as dark.

The only caution about using a microphone like this with hi-hats is that you better absolutely love the sound of your hi-hat because it will capture it as is.

Unlike other microphones like the AKG P170 or the C451B that I will review later, this mic is ruthlessly real-sounding. If you're using a hi-hat that is too dull, too old, or possibly just bad quality, you will get the same result when you track it. It will sound like an excellently captured bad hi-hat.

So just beware when you're using a very flat-sounding mic like this.

Again, you can always use a tube preamp after this microphone, which should help things have a little more color. Of course, the best option out there is just for you to have a great-sounding hi-hat to begin with.

It also has a 3-position switch that allows you to adjust the frequency response of the microphone. This is great for getting rid of room noise or wind noise if you’re playing a gig outside.

The lockable pad allows you to get a loud and aggressive hi-hat sound without changing how the mics respond to frequencies.

This is a great way to liven up the flat, neutral response of this microphone by using the pad, positioning your hi-hat very close, and adding quite a bit of boost from a nice-sounding Class A circuitry preamp.

If you're on a budget and you happen to be using a UAD Apollo or Volt interface, you can use plug-in emulations that add some nice color to a mic like this without having to invest in expensive preamps.

The best thing about this mic is that it’s extremely versatile. If you’re more than just a drummer, you can use it for your other instruments and it will work wonderfully. If you’re just a drummer, it will work well as an overhead mic as well.

The mic has a rugged steel exterior that makes it able to take on any weather conditions. It works well in studios and live gigs. Since it comes with a few features and a higher-build quality, it is a lot more expensive than the previous two mics on the list.

I’ve always seen the Shure SM81 as one of the standard mics that everyone compares alternatives to. Companies produce cheaper mics to compete with it, but they never quite match up. So, it may be better to just get the real thing and have a high-quality hi-hat mic to work with.

I think the SM81 is one of the most neutral mics on the market. Many condensers add a bit of color to enhance certain frequencies, making them good for certain instruments. But I’ve found that this mic gives you exactly what you put into it, making it a recording or mastering engineer’s dream.

It’s one of the best sounding small-diaphragm mics on the market and it works very well as a hi-hat mic. The sound is balanced and it does a great job of eliminating bleed from the other drums around your setup.

It’s fairly easy to mix and add EQ onto your hi-hat thanks to the flat response of the mic. If you’re going to be playing really hard, you can just flip the 20dB pre-attenuation switch to make sure there’s no distortion.

And even though it is technically a very flat, responding neutral microphone, I do feel like it adds a little bit of warmth, especially in the low mids that can be very beneficial to high hats and cymbals — particularly ride cymbals that can sound extremely harsh and thin.

On hi hats, this mic reminds me a lot of my vintage Neumann KM 84, which are actually very similar in size and appearance. Something tells me sE Electronics was inspired to emulate these out-of-production Neumann pencil mics.

The best part of this mic is arguably the size of it. Since there is so much potential for hitting the microphone when it’s placed near the hi-hats, it’s great that the sE7 is so small. It allows you to optimally place it without worrying about damaging it.

I know we're mostly covering microphone types that work well with hi-hats in this article, but something that I've learned throughout my years of producing and playing live — both as a drummer and keyboardist — is that optimal placement of hi-hats varies considerably and is very subjective from person to person.

Usually, if you look up general positioning for a hi-hat specific mic, it's about 6 to 8 inches from the hi-hat, almost where the hi-hat stand top ends, and pointed down toward the hi-hat around where the drummer's stick probably hits it.

However, when you have a pencil mic that's as small as this sE7, you can get much more creative with your placement because it has a very unidirectional capture thanks to its small capsule. This is great for experimenting and getting different sounds out of your hi-hat.

If you do the traditional placement of the hat — basically vertical, almost like a cross on top of the dead center of your hi-hat — you'll get a very metallic and almost dull, normal-ish hat sound. But if you place this microphone pointed toward the edge of the hat, away from where the stick hits but very close to where the hat opens, you actually capture more of the harmonic content of the metal striking together.

This produces a very modern sound that doesn't have a lot of that low, muddy metallic sound that many hats get.

It almost sounds like a sampled hat that has been pre-cured. It's hard to describe this technique, so I would just try it out if I were you. Out of all the mics in this roundup, this is the one that works best for the technique.

Altogether, it’s a great inexpensive microphone with some good features. It just won’t sound as good as the higher-priced mics with the same features.

I don’t like to admit it, but there have been a few times in my life where I’ve whacked the hi-hat mic incredibly hard with a drum stick. It was either because the mic was placed too close to the hi-hat, or because I was trying to reach a cymbal that I had placed just next to it.

Having a small hi-hat mic like this will help prevent that scenario from playing out. While you should always be careful with how you place mics, smaller mics will always be easier to place comfortably than larger ones will.

I would have loved this sE7 to be the hi-hat mic in those times I was reckless. I probably would have missed it with my stick.

This mic is a reinvention of the AKG C 451, one of the most popular studio microphones of all time. That tells you that it’s a worthy mic to look out for, especially for your hi-hats.

Firstly, it does a great job of bringing out the metallic tone of your cymbals. It’s a great mic for picking up rich transient signals, perfect for hi-hats. It’s extremely accurate and has many improvements from the original C 451.

It has a switchable highpass filter along with a pre-attenuation pad that can be selected at 0dB, -10dB, and -20dB. The mic makes your hi-hats sound fantastic without any mixing or EQing, giving you a great base sound to work from.

Similar to its predecessor, the AKG C 451 is the ideal microphone for studio recording. It has highly reliable qualities that will work wonders every time you track a song. Your hi-hats will come out sounding very clear in the mix.

I know I touched upon the importance of microphones with good transient response earlier in this article, but none of these mics even get close to the transient response of this Premium microphone. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this might be the best microphone in the world for capturing hi-hat transients.

The reason is its combination of switchable SPL handling and the architecture of the vintage 451 capsule.

In practice, this means that transient response will be extremely important for any genre — whether you're recording simple quarter note soul and hip-hop style grooves like those played by Questlove (where the hi-hat is crucial for the shuffle feel of the groove), or capturing very fast rock hi-hats where the drummer might switch from eighth to sixteenth note patterns during the same song.

As I said in the introduction, the hi-hat is the heart of the groove — the shaker equivalent to hand percussion.

It's very hard to even know if a groove is laid-back, swinging, or straight without either a ride or a hi-hat pattern. In essence, the hi-hat sound defines the groove.

The clearer the attacks on the hi-hat, the more you actually feel the movement of the groove. That's why producers and drummers go through great lengths to find the perfect match between the right hat and the right mic to capture it.

The big downside is that you’re going to be spending a large amount of money on this mic. However, it will be a big investment as the mic will last years of use and bring out the best from your drums.

I have done a fair bit of studio recordings where the sound engineer put one or two of these at my drum kit. After seeing it several times, I realized that it was a microphone with a good reputation. Especially for picking up drum sounds.

I’ve also seen it being used in live gigging settings. However, I think that studio settings are where the microphone thrives.

The problem with this hi-hat mic is that it's somewhat too sensitive in noisy environments due to its powerful capsule. Even when aimed directly at the hi-hat during a live stage performance, there's a good chance that leakage from the sides will infiltrate the signal.

It's not known for excellent rejection because it's modeled after its vintage counterpart, which didn't incorporate the rejection capabilities that many modern microphone technologies have developed.

I once met a person who had been using a set of AKG C 451s since 1980. He told me how they had been his most trusted mics for decades. It just shows how durable and dependable this mic is. If you’re looking for something that will last you a serious amount of time, this may be the best option.

It’s a pre-polarized condenser that can be used in both studio and live playing situations. The mic reacts well to fast transients at high pressure levels, basically meaning that it will be able to take on loud and fast hi-hat playing fairly easily.

The tone it produces is very similar to the Shure SM81. However, it sounds a bit more refined in the upper mids. This means it may be a better option if you have bright cymbals for rock or pop.

The ADX51 is a solid microphone that will be able to last several tours. It’s quiet, articulate, and detailed. It’s also a bit more affordable than the Shure SM81.

I found that this mic makes your hi-hats sound incredibly clear. Whether you’re using it to record or amplify your drum sound in a live setting, everyone will be able to hear exactly what you’re doing with your hats.

While it shines through with bright cymbals, you could still consider using it for dark and washier ones. It just wouldn’t sound as clear. However, I’ve often found that clarity isn’t the biggest priority with dark and washy hi-hats.

I would say that it's a mix between the Shure and the AKG C451B. In fact, many people call this the "budget 451," and it definitely does the job of being a semi-clone of this great premium microphone.

Sonically, the fact that it doesn't extend all the way to 20kHz and capture the extreme high-end the way the 451 does might actually be a plus. This sets this microphone in a slightly different category and gives it a little versatility in that you can capture extremely bright or heavily harmonic-inducing cymbals, as well as just hi-hats.

One thing to note that I think might be a little extreme is that the high-pass filter defaults at 150Hz, which might take a tad bit of the warmth out of the attack of most hi-hats.

If you're going for that bright pop sound, then it's not a problem. But if you're looking for a more soulful, vintage sound — almost '70s in nature — you don't want the extreme lows and subs, but you also don't want to cut it at 150Hz. I wish they would've done the cutoff point closer to 90 or 100Hz. But they must've had their reasons.

Also, maybe it was because they had to keep the design somewhat affordable, but the maximum SPL is only 132dB, which is much lower than the AKG 451, thus closer to the Shure SM81 specs.

While not a dealbreaker, it is unfortunate because I believe SPL also applies to getting very good transient response out of hi-hat mics.

Most people associate SPL with vocals, loud guitar amps, kick drums, and heavy percussion, but attacks also carry a sharp signal which factors into how the pressure level of the capsule reacts.

In all my years of drumming, I’ve realized that Shure and Audix are in tight competition with each other. This is especially true in the drum microphone world. Even though this condenser is cheaper than the Shure alternative, I’d suggest you choose whichever company you like the most and get the mic from that brand.

However, the fact that this mic truly feels like a hybrid premium also makes it quite tempting. Even on paper, the specs look like a great mix of an AKG and a Shure.

That's actually quite a compliment, and it certainly makes me feel like I'm almost getting an affordable clone of a very expensive mic instead of just another Shure mic.

Very little EQ is needed when using the e614. However, a few touch-ups will get your hi-hats sounding punchy and effective. It works pretty well for all kinds of hi-hat properties from dry to bright. The high SPL also means you won’t have to worry about any distortion.

In terms of design, the e 614 has a sleek black appearance. It’s relatively small for a pencil condenser, yet thick enough to feel durable.

It’s a great mic that sits somewhere in the middle of the other mics on this list. It could definitely have more features for the price, though.

Out of all the mics I’ve spoken about, I think that the Sennheiser e614 has the most value for its money. It drastically outperforms the class it’s in, meaning it sounds a lot better than how much it costs.

I also found that the small and compact body makes it incredibly easy to position around your hi-hats. Whether you’re placing it on top or underneath, you’ll be able to position it vert comfortably. It will be close enough to get a great sound, yet out the way of your stick motion.

This mic features what we call a supercardioid polar pattern, which means it has a very small and precise capture area. In other words, wherever it's pointed, it captures that particular sound and rejects the rest.

This is a great quality to have in a pencil mic for playing and capturing live hi-hats. However, it also poses a potential creative problem.

To me, supercardioid mics when used live are practical because you end up getting a clear signal, though usually quite generic and extremely dry because of the rejection of the acoustics and room around you, including the stage.

While this has always been a feature that makes life easier for live front-of-house engineers, it also isn't very exciting sonically.

So I will go against the popular grain and advise you to try using this microphone in the studio instead.

I discovered this technique when using supercardioid mics and pencil mics that really opened up the possibilities of getting a very precise, tight sound that still has a lot of vibe. It's called "parallel room crush."

If you use this Sennheiser mic in a tight or dead room or isolation room in a studio, it will give you a very linear natural sound devoid of much harmonic content.

Here's my production tip: send a version of this signal out of one of your effects buses to an auxiliary track. Add a plate reverb — any one will do — and then add a tube compressor, 1176 style compressor, or an Empirical Labs Distressor after the plate.

Dial in extreme levels of compression; I would go above 10 to 15 dB reduction so you're getting a crushed signal. Then blend that back in with the original dry signal, and it will open up a whole new dimension of vibe on your hi-hat.

Using this technique, the hi-hat is probably one of the best captures you could ever have to get one of the best hi-hat sounds you've ever heard.

If you’re looking for a great deal, I’d suggest you consider this mic for your hi-hats. You could use it for other applications as well.