New Music Gear Monday: Waves Torque Drum Pitch Control Plugin

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working with real drums, samples or loops, getting the pitch right on the drums is critical to how the song ultimately sounds. That can be a hassle though, so much so that some songs are built around the drum pitch rather than the other way around. On big budget sessions the production usually employs a dedicated drum tuner to get the drum pitch perfect for the song, but that still takes time. Trying to use a normal pitch correction tool to do it during mixing doesn’t always get the best results without leaving artifacts, so what’s a producer to do? Waves has just introduced a tool that promises to make the drum tuning process a lot lot faster and easier and it’s called Torque.

Torque is extremely clever in how it works. Using Waves proprietary Organic ReSynthesis engine allows it to work in near real time, which is pretty amazing considering that we live in a latency-driven world.

Let’s Make It Tune

The way the plugin works is that the frequency analyzer display will show you the peaks in the response. You then move the Focus bandwidth control over one of the peaks where it will show you the frequency and the musical note that it represents. If you want to hear just that focused area, you can select the speaker icon.

The next thing is to use the Threshold control to dial in the level of the signal peak detection where Torque begins to work. If the Threshold is set too high, then it the indicator will shine green. You then decrease the control until it turns yellow, which indicates the proper setting. If you go to far, it will turn red, which means that the plugin will be shifting more of the body of the sound, or be triggered with leakage, causing audio artifacts to be generated. This is a great feature that I wish more processors would use.

From there you can change the pitch of the sound with the large Torque control in the center. You can move the it as much as 1200 cents (1 octave) up or down.

Add The Tweaks

Two additional controls add tonal adjustment tweaks. The Speed control below the main Torque control in the center controls the speed of the formats of the sounds as the pitch is shifted. In other words, the formants naturally slow down as the pitch is decreased, so you use the Speed control to speed them up so they sound more natural. You’d do the opposite if the pitch is increased.

The Torque Trim control is used to control the level of the pitch as it’s lowered. Since there are more low frequencies, they’re naturally going to be higher in level, so Trim will allow you to keep those lower frequencies at the same, more natural level, as before.

Torque normally costs $79 but it’s available for an introductory price of just $19.99. It works on Macs and PCs on all plugin formats and at a sample frequency up to 192kHz.

You can find out more here, or watch the quick introduction video below.

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