Recording - January 2018 - 49

Torque dial that's best thought of as
your virtual drum key or torque wrench.
It has a throw of ±1200 Cents (1 octave).
Once you choose the frequency to alter,
turn this dial and hear the tone change
up or down in a very elastic way that
does sound like tuning a drumhead.
Not only can you tune the drum to a
new pitch, but you can automate this
control and literally create multiple
"talking drum" style tones out of a
single static drum hit.
To further zero in on the sound
and control excess flab, boom, and
buildup, there are Input and Output
meters, a crucial Threshold slider
(yellow = good, green = not enough),
a Speed slider similar to the attack
and release settings on a compressor,
a slider labeled Torque Trim that helps
to fine-tune the effect to best lay into
the mix, and an overall Output slider
and meters.
I don't have space to give a full tutorial
here, but there are some great setup
videos on Waves' YouTube page. Each
of the controls works in tandem to tune

your drum, and do it in the most
natural-sounding way.
Are there any artifacts to using Torque
like you'll hear in other pitch processes?
If you mean, "Can you push the plugin too far and make the source drum
sound overly effected and strange,"
then yes. As with any pitch process, you
will need to get the hang of this plugin and move all of the abovementioned
controls in small steps to fine-tune your
sounds for maximum believability. That
said, artifacts like zippering, garbled
aliased stretching and the like are pretty
much nonexistent.
Fine control is especially vital as
it relates to real tracked drums in a
mix with kit bleed. In a multi-mic setup, some patience and subtlety are
required. If you do extreme tuning on
an individual element like a kick or
snare, just know that you will probably
need to do some tweaking in the overhead mics with one to two instances
of Torque (one for each drum) to help
the sound gel together without
conflicting resonances.

If this sounds scary, it's not. This
is where getting a handle on proper
Threshold, Speed, and Trim settings is
crucial, but once you do that, Torque
works great. My most extreme use of
Torque was turning a 14" specialty kick
into a large 24" bass cannon, all without losing the character of the beater on
the head, including the thud and flapping
and bounceback.
In more normal use of a few cents'
adjustment here or there, Torque can
be a real mix saver for shifting subtly
out-of-tune drums... which you might
not become aware of until other tonal
instruments are layered on top. I
really like using Torque on toms to get
them perfectly in the scale/key of the
song. Using Torque on individual
sample-based and electronic drums is
pretty darn transparent, yet it can also
make a great sound design tool where
it's fun to get weird and freaky.
This is a great tool, made even greater
by its very low price, often made even
lower by periodic sales. It's hard to
argue with that!
http://www.cloudmicrophones.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2018
