In this free video tutorial, we show you how to retune drums using Waves Torque. It’s smart and simple to use. Torque detects the formant and amplitude of drums. It then reassembles it allowing you to manipulate tonal and pitch characteristics while preserving natural attack, resonance and duration of the original sound.
It is no secret, one of the big secrets in getting great sounding live drum recordings lay in how well the kit was been tuned prior to recording. Drum kits that haven’t been tuned with any consideration can struggle to sit right in a mix. A good drummer worth their salt can easily tune their kit to sound faithful in whatever style of music or mix they need to track in, though there can be times later in a mix when producers may want certain kit pieces to be lower or higher in pitch to work better in the song.
To adjust the pitch of a recorded snare or kick drum producers traditionally would reach for either pitch shifting or drum replacement. While generic pitch shifting can work it can easily be overdone with audible artefacts as an irritating side-effect. Drum replacement, while being very powerful, is also a good workaround though can take away from the organic personality of the live drums. So, if you want to retune your close mic drum channels and both generic pitch shifting and drum replacement don’t yield the results you desire, what else can you try?
Watch our video to hear how by tuning the live close snare mic channel down in Torque by a touch really helps to compound the overall aggression in the mood of the production.
Visit Waves for more information about Torque.