Tune Your Drums

The key to a great-sounding mix is rooted in the tonal balance of the drums. Yet, like mixers, we don't always get hit with drums that are perfectly tuned or recorded. Drums can be a tricky part to blend into the mix. Because of that, many effects and sound processors are available to manipulate them. Equalizers, compressors, modulation effects, you name it. Tuning the drums according to the root key of the track showed great benefits, so more and more processors are available for this task.  

Torque by Waves Audio

In my opinion, one of the best-sounding tone-shifting plugins is, without any doubt, the recently released Torque by Waves. This plugin is made especially for changing acoustic and electronic drum sound tonality. Torque is a precision drum tone shifter that will help you salvage mistuned drums, pitch them to a specific key, and enhance their tone – without retriggering or replacing, without the artifacts introduced by traditional pitch shifters, and without losing the body, timbre, resonance or attack. Driven by Waves' Organic ReSynthesis® technology, Torque detects and analyzes the drums' formant, amplitude, and carrier information, reassembles it, and allows you to manipulate the tonal and pitch characteristics, all while preserving the natural attack, resonance, and duration of the original sound. So, without further delay, let us dive into it!  

Tightening the Drums

Firstly, here we have a drum loop created in SoundBridge that sounds pretty tight already. Besides that, I have made a short bassline sequence, so let's hear how it sounds.  

~Drum loop - Unprocessed

Bassline - Unprocessed  

Nevertheless, the sub-frequency of the kick drum incorporated in this drum loop is not quite tuned with the bass line sequence. I will drop Torque on the drum loop MIDI channel created in Soundbridge to fix this.  

 

As you can see from the picture above, Torque has a relatively simple interface. However, the plugin itself is by no means a simple one. The main parameters for controlling are the "Focus "slider in the upper part of the interface and the "Torque "knob in the center. Consequently, the Focus Display is a formant analyzer that displays the formant energy of the input signal across the frequency spectrum. You can use it to locate the Focus frequency, the frequency around which tone shifting will occur.  

Main Parameters

The Torque Knob controls the amount of formant shift. This action mainly affects the frequencies around the Focus setting. So, if Torque is not correcting the tone as expected, re-adjust the Focus setting. Cents on the knob display the amount of offset. Torque Speed affects the time-constant qualities of the Torque process. More extended Speed settings often yield smoother attacks and releases, while shorter settings usually result in a quicker formant shift. The Torque Trim sets the level of the shifted process (i.e., the processed section of the signal only) concerning the unprocessed signal.  

Hear the Difference!

After I have explained the main parameters of this useful plugin, let us hear how it affected the drum loop from the beginning. To listen to the difference better, we will listen to it solo and then with the bassline.  

~Drum loop - Processed 

~Drum loop - Processed + Bassline