So I love my Volca Beats (no joke…). Especially the hats when the “grain” is turned all the way down. Each trigger of the hats gets a slightly different timbre because the noise grain is so coarse for a lack of a better word…
Would it be possible to mimic this sound on the Analog Four (MKI)? The hats on the Volca Beats don’t sound like the regular filtered noise like a lot of other drum machines - at least not to me…
Hope to hear from someone with an A4 before I pull the trigger…
Thanks!
Could you post an audio clip of the hat sound you like from the Volca Beat?
Could definitely use an LFO to get random variation per trigger.
I had it almost 10 years ago, but wasn’t it a sample? 
sure thing:
No, the hats are not a sample, but the cymbal is
And yes, I could just use that sample… but where is the fun in that 
Pretty sure that the volca beats hi hats grain setting adjusts ring modulation on the noise source which is why the pitch changes with it. The hats are an analog circuit, the cymbal is indeed pcm.
I don’t have an A4 but I know that there’s no dedicated ring mod on one, however you might still be able to fake it.
Thanks!
Found a scematic somewhere that shows that the noise source starts as a 1bit noise source that is mixed with a white noise source. Maybe a sample/hold on an oscilator pitch together with white noise on the A4 would do the trick…
That short hihat sound you’ve posted isn’t very informative, since it’s … very short …
Shig seems to know the score, however listening to that example you could definitely mimic it with noise and an LFO on a low pass filter. Perhaps with longer decay the ring mod qualities would be more apparent.
White noise will lead to a shaker sound, not a hihat. A hihat is a cymbal and made out of metal, not sand.
(White noise is usally added to diffuse the sound a bit more and mimic even more frequencies, which only works as such if there’s metal present.)
In the opened hihat we hear lots of [metallic] frequencies and white noise, so that is what has to be reproduced. The “lots of frequencies” is usually done on analog drum machines by a lot of microtonally detuned square oscillators.
On the A4, we have only two oscs to be freely tuned. To mimic more, we can use both oscs, pulse wave, AM, Metal OSC Sync and FM.
One of my A4 hihats, created that way (random pick 
):
This is a nice hihat - super metalic!
The above volca example is very easy to achieve using a quick stab of noise, however:
I ended up using a bandpass filter, which got a bit closer to the example - you can then use the frequency to tune it. Tiny bit of envelope on the filter with an LFO changing the frequency.
I didn’t spend any time dialling it in but I think you could get very close.
It is a while ago that I’ve had my A4, but osc AM is essentially the same as ringmod.
I’ve used that quite a bit to make metallic noises for hats and cymbals: works great!
Sound nice!
I’m very hung up on those things [as you can see 
], because I believe that if a sound is heard a 100 times or more in a track, then we should look as close as possible what it is. And without the metallic overtones (as faint as it might be), there’s just not the excitement for the ear … which, after all - I believe - attracted to this sound in the first place
(In the video I posted, when the grain dial is moved on the closed hat, all kinds of pitches are audible.)
The problem is not with your assessment of how hi hats should sound but how the volca beats hi hats sound in real life, especially with the grain turned down on the hats.
It sounds a little more metallic with the grain turned up as you can hear… when I turn the grain up, but OP says he wants volca beats hats out of the A4 and on their best day the volca beats hats sound like a wounded pepper shaker.
Sounds awesome, throw a stereo delay on there with the delay times offset and then we are talking! I can definitely see myself using that sound in the right context.
exactly! The wounded pepper shaker is what I want to mimic! Here is a sample with the open hat that I want to mimic.
It sooooo grainy - i love it!