Vocals sucking up the hi-hats

[Stretch]

Hey guys whatsup,
I have come across a problem that you guys must have faced before... undoubtably...  I'm mixing stuff down and the vocals appear to be interfering with my hi-hats.
The vocals + the hi-hats are in between 300-5k hz. The hi-hats go all the way to 20k (thats not so weird).
But whenever I play them together they both have a small resonating sound to it... just a little bit too obvious that they are clashing with eachother.
To be notified as a messy sound, rather than cool.
I've tried EQing them out without losing the sound i want them to have, but failed... any alternatives to solve this problem?

Thanks! Greets from holland.

[neka]

Could sidechaining it work?

[Stretch]

That is a brilliant idea my friend, i'm going to make work of it right now.

EDIT: not working... as the vocals are an almost constant sort of chant its now the hi-hats sucking up the vocals! gahh back to the EQ-tables. Hands on deck! I'll just start from scratch. Thanks anyway!

[Spit]

If sidechaining really doesn't work (are you sure you've got the vocals compressing the hats and not vice-versa?) then I'd try and find the offending resonant peak in the hats and notch it out, which sounds like your plan anyway. If that still doesn't work, maybe a similar-but-different hi-hat sample?

[x]

If you're lucky your peak will be happening below around 1k. You can knock 6dB or more off the bottom of the hat with a low shelf and eliminate a lot of clashes and it won't be noticable in 99% of final mixes since the sub-1k part of a hi-hat almost always gets swamped by the rest of the mix anyway. It'll also clean up your percussive bottom end a bit too.

[Gyu]

Are you mixing with the tracks solo'd? If so maybe you shouldn't, many people advise against it.
There is only so much space in the mix. You need to choose which freqencies you need from each part and eq accordingly.
For example you could let the hats take up the very high freqs and take some of the lower highs out, then take the high highs out of the vocals.
Does that make sense?
Just my 2p

[Wascal]

You could sidechain the EQ on the hihats with the vocal using something like the Sonalksis DQ1 dynamic equaliser?   That way rather than dipping the whole hihat volume it would dip the clashing frequency.  The DQ1 has a sidechain input that changes the amount of boost or cut on a frequency band 

http://www.sonalksis.com/dq1.htm

[Richard_Gale]

keep playing with the sidechain imo.  correctly setup you should be able to get it so the vocals almost completely dip out whenever your hat hits.  with the right settings it wont be noticeable that the vocals are dipping