BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland and we’re taking a look at the M-Audio Torq Xponent. This is demo part one of two, and we’ll be looking at basic hardware setup and how to get your set started.

First of all, you’ll notice one of the really cool features here. We have virtual turntables.

[BILL HOLLAND MANIPULATING VIRTUAL TURNTABLES ON THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Work like a real turntable. They’re also touch sensitive so I can put pressure on them as well.

[BILL HOLLAND MANIPULATING VIRTUAL TURNTABLES ON THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

You can find your cue point for your scratch.

[BILL HOLLAND MANIPULATING VIRTUAL TURNTABLES ON THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

And you can also, if you want to, turn the touch off. Now I can move through the track but it’s not scrubbing like a normal turntable, but I’m going to turn that back on because I like having the option to actually hear what I’m doing. You’ll see here we have the play button, the cue button, a reverse and forward button. We have cue points that you can set.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK AND SETTING CUE POINTS USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

So that’s one thing you can do. You can also go back or forward a step with these guys right here. You can lock your pitch up and down.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Notice right now it time stretches my track.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Turn the lock on.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

It affects the pitch and the time stretching.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

I also have a loop that I can set up as a one-bar loop, two-bar, four-bar, or eight-bar, and in a little bit you’ll see that I can actually change the size as I turn the loop on and off. Here we have our effects sends. We can set these to whatever effects we want them to control, and we can assign custom buttons like for example here, I’ve replaced my on/off switch with the loop -- with the cue set, so I can hit set and then I can hit my cue point, and I have cue point 3 set.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Another thing about the wheel here is I -- if I grab the edge, I can push it forward or backward without scratching, but if I touch the top...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

...it automatically senses that I’m touching it.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Really, really useful for cueing up tracks. Also, we have our EQs...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

...and a master gain...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

...and we have kill switches.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

You can kill the gain as well.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Now, another thing you’ll notice is we have an XY controller which serves us both a mouse control for the computer, or if I hit MIDI they’ll control my effects. So, with the MIDI button on, I can control, for example, my filter.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING A TRACK USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Now, let’s set it up so I have the same track on both sides using a classic Italo disco called “It’s a War by Kano. We’re just going to see what we can do with loops and working with this.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

And I started this track. Notice I can either manually sync this or put it completely off beat but I can bring it back into sync if I get lazy.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Now, let’s say I get off a little bit.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

I can either listen for it...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

...I can cue it up or I can watch my waveform on the computer.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Now, let’s pause it for a second. Let me show you how to use the crossfader to do a live re-edit with this.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

We’re a little bit off.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

Or I can use again the auto-sync.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

This is a style of mixing where you actually re-edit on the fly. You can do disco re-edits this way and it’s especially useful. Back in the vinyl days, we had to actually go to the record and have two copies of the record and go back and forth and make sure it was cued up. Now, you have the waveform in front of you and setting cue points makes it that much easier.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

So, if I set that, I have the cue points set up.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING AND MANIPULATING “IT’S A WAR” BY KANO USING THE M-AUDIO TORQ XPONENT]

So, that’s how you can use cue points to actually re-edit on the fly and do disco re-edits. You can keep this going for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. It’s a classic DJing technique but the M-Audio Xponent makes it that much easier.

For now, I’m Bill Holland. In the next demo, we’re going to take a look at looping and how to start really getting creative with what you can do in Torq with M-Audio Xponent. But for now, this is Gearwire.Com.