Category Archives: Tuning

Waves Release A New Drum Tone Shifter Plug-in – Torque

Waves have released a new plug-in called Torque which they have designed to enhance the tone of snares, toms, kicks or an entire drum kit in your mix, with natural-sounding results that no regular pitch-shifter will allow.

One of the keys to a great-sounding mix can be the tonal balance of the drums. Yet, we don’t always get drums that were perfectly tuned or recorded in our tracks.

Waves describe Torque as a precision drum tone shifter designed to help you salvage mistuned drums, pitch them to a specific key and enhance their tone all without retriggering or replacing, without the artifacts introduced by traditional pitch shifters, and without losing body, timbre, resonance or attack.

Torque is driven by Waves’ Organic ReSynthesis technology, and it detects, analyses and separates the drums’ formant, amplitude and carrier information,  allowing you to manipulate the tonal and pitch characteristics, whilst preserving the natural attack, resonance and duration of the original sound.

With zero latency, Torque is designed to be ideal for the studio as well as for live shows, so FOH engineers can now re-pitch problematic drum tone mid-show or even mid-song.

Torque Features

  • Tone shifter for acoustic and electronic drums
  • Adjusts drum timbre & pitch without retriggering or replacing
  • Accurately shifts by +/- 1200 cents (12 semitones / 1 octave)
  • Focus section for precision formant/frequency control
  • Precision threshold & trim controls
  • Torque Live component with zero latency
  • Driven by Waves’ Organic ReSynthesis® technology
  • Price: Normally $69, introductory price $29

I spend a lot of time getting unwanted resonances out of drum recordings, but often what’s left is unsatisfying. Sample triggering is time-consuming and inaccurate, and the musicians don’t feel the result represents ‘their’ sound. Torque lets me dial in the exact drum tone I need for my mix instantly, while keeping the original DNA of the performance intact. Lower pitch can give kicks and toms all the power they need, while higher pitch can work wonders on snares to make them crack through even the thickest arrangement. All I can say is – where has this plugin been all my life?!

— Dave Darlington Composer / Recording, Mixing & Mastering Engineer Avicii, David Guetta, Sting, Oz

Editing Sibilant Vocals In PreSonus Studio One With Revoice Pro 3.3

When working with Sibiliant Vocals, you will usually find two different opinion’s. One camp will swear by manual editing, while the other claims that a good De-Esser can get the job done. I myself land somewhere in between. For me, a bit of manual editing of some sort combined with a De-Esser sounds the best to my ears.

Having said that, this doesn’t necessarily mean that one has to do all this editing 100% manually! In fact, its quite the opposite. Wherever I can find a quick way speed up a process like this, Im game. Which leads me to the point of this article.

A while back, our good friends at Synchro Arts released Revoice Pro 3.3. Along with a bunch of different features aimed specifically at Studio One users, Revoice Pro 3.3 also added a new function which gives users control over the level of ‘un-pitched’ voicing’s. So this would cover anything like T’s, K’s, Esses, and breaths, etc. In addition, they added a couple shortcut’s which allow the user to quickly access and modify the level in 3 db increments, or freely.

If you haven’t already put it together, then I’ll drop a small hint. This happens to be an amazing tool for manually adjusting Sibiliant Vocal tracks without having to automate, or cut up your audio events! There’s a nice visual indication as to where these ‘un-pitched’ voicing’s are located, and the workflow is relatively simple.

Check out the above video to see the workflow in action & feel free to leave your comments below. 

Sometimes You Need To Fix it in The Mix.

 

Ive just been listening to the fantastic Pro Tools Expert Podcast. Over the last few weeks there have been discussions on Myths Of Modern Recording – Fix It In The Mix. So naturally, I thought I would write an article which defends the method of fixing it in the mix.

While I am an advocate of getting the correct take at source, I have been on both sides of the fence, and I am quite happy with using what ever it takes for the final product to be great.

During the Podcast on the 5th September, Russ, Mike, Julian and James were in a discussion about how Post-Production is more expensive than Pre-Production. While I agree, sometimes time constraints and logistics play a role, and here is one example.

Two years ago I was producing an album, that album was partly recorded at Abbey Road. The problem was that the artists were from all over Europe, and the artists were not singing in their native tongue. We had Abbey Road, studio 3 booked for 3 days to record 8 vocalists, Piano and guitar. Its a massive privilege to record at Abbey Road, Using their vintage microphones and compressors etc. I can tell you at the end of those three days I had clearly aged 10 years. I think I even had hair at the beginning.

We got all the parts recorded but with issues. If I had the time I would happily spend days recording the perfect take, but we didn’t, so I had to fix a lot of the recordings when i got back to my studio. The vocals needed tuning, and I’m quite a perfectionist when it comes to vocal tuning. After all, I mainly work in the Pop market where everything needs to be perfect. It was much cheaper to fix this after the recording session than to re-record at Abbey road, which was costing the client £2000 per day. 

This is only one example, but there have been many times that I have been in a recording situation where things have had to be recorded under time constraints. So yes – record properly, and record the best takes that you can possibly record, but don’t be afraid to fix in the mix if you are left with no other choice.

Ideally we would all love to have large recording budgets and unlimited time, but most of the time these days, this simply isn’t the case. While it’s great to have the time to record the perfect take, I would much rather record the perfect performance, then use the fantastic tools we have available to us, such as Revoice Pro, Melodyne and Autotune to fix it in the mix.

What about you? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this! So feel free to leave us a comment below.