You can live record both of these things on the Rytm.
For humanising hh’s I usually use an LFO on random to slightly mod the amp decay.
It would be nice to have 3 LFO’s on the Rytm, as per the OT.
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I live record everything on the rytm and have quantization off.
With the hats, I record the closed and open in the same pass and try to do it in one pattern cycle (64 steps is my default). This feels the most like I’m actually playing hi hats.
Retrigs here and there for flam effects. LFO to decay time has become a recent favorite of mine. Wait, can you assign velocity to decay time? I should try that.
I go in after the two hat tracks are recorded and adjust mix between synth and samples per step (fast and sloppy style). Then add some high probability to some of the steps.
These things usually do the trick for me.
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…variety for individual velocity levels always come first…
…swing amount…
…nudging specific trigs back or forth via plocking…
…individual trigs’ filterstatus via plocking…
…accents via various soundlocks…
LFO on amp attack on a white noise makes really nice shaker/soft hat sound.
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A good trick for this is to match your p-locks for velocity and probability. I.e the harder hits have a higher chance of playing, the softer hits have a lower chance of playing. This then starts to sound very much like a you’ve got a primary rhythm going on, with shifting ghost notes around it.
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My own favorite is a slight LFO on decay.
I hit my hats to have different velocities and capture the inspiration on the moment, but I often edit it by adding some ghost hits or removing/lowering velocity on others.
Probability is also interesting. You might want to lock some steps to fit your groove though.
I see hats as the background pulse that draws the groove, extract the more complex rhythms from the main one given by the kick + snare combo.
It’s worth asking yourself what role you want them to play in the part.
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Don’t own a Rtm but for natural sounding ridecymbals in a row i’d like to use 2 tracks on DT with infinite decay and some reverb. The 1,3,5 etc on one track and 2,4,6 on the other so the tail doesn’t get choked.
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Dynamics, decay, tone, timing.
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To me a big one (in addition to the previous comments about LFOs and parameter recording) is adding in trigs that behave like ghost notes. I’m a drummer myself, and I love playing syncopated ghost notes on snare with my left hand, or on the HH with my left hand if I’m on the ride. I keep this in mind when making beats on the AR by setting up trigs adjacent and microtimed nearby the main hits and then drastically reducing the velocity. For good measure, I like making a slight filter freq/rez change to get a different timbre from these other, more subtle hits, and then often put a high probability condition in there too so that the AR drummer misses them sometimes too
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