I've found this method to be way faster I'm screwing less with faders to get levels to an overall balance and of course I'm not listening to the track over n over n over burning my ears.. when using the pink noise method my ears are still fresh at the end of balancing and ready to Fine tune my eqs, I've tried it with stuff thats been eQ'd before and stuff that hasn't and it just works every time .. and sure once you have the balance some stuff needs to be moved this isn't your final mix here .. maybe you want the guitars up here or there .. maybe the vocal .. but the starting point is as really is good as it gets and i don't care what special ears you think you have this method is good ...I'm kind of shocked how well and how fast this works and i don't get why any one would even dare argue that it doesn't.

 

First off, I'd love to thank @MMJ2017 for taking the time to bring up a solid method to working a mix. @peterA, please, let me break it down to you because I guess in all the mud of arguments in this thread, there's something valuable to take away. It's not at all irrelevant or pointless information. In fact, a lot can be learned (at least, I have).

The concept of mixing in stages is about saving your best of effort and maximizing productivity along the mix process.

Before Stage 1: Proper Recording and Editing

Unmentioned it is that before any pink-noise referencing, recordings need to be final and tone shaping should be about concluded, too (Tuning, quantizing, phase relationships, overall tone of parts, and stems/grouping/auxiliary buss preparation should precede).

Stage 1: Fader-and-Pan Mix

Use pink noise (or your prefered reference track) using the method described. Spend around 10 minutes and this mix could be good for sending out as an overview of the song to a client --the classic, "I know it's not even started, but after the recording session, I'd like to take home a version to listen to." This is not at all a commercial mixdown. This equates doing a sketch before a drawing.

Stage 2: Mix Shaping

Your generic pink-or-whatever-noise reference mix of under ten minutes now gets to have a personality with the use of compressors, EQs and spatial effects like reverb and delay. Here's where you "undo" or "step down" from the generic nature of the static mix in stage 1.

Stage 3: Sweetening

Here's the ear-candy stuff that is added mostly to bus groups and the two buss. Things like a mastering-grade compression or saturation plugins (think Saturn, Vertigo VSM-3, or you favorite finalizing Acqua EQ), or maybe nothing at all. Here the changes are final touches, in slight increments. No radical changes anymore since the previous step took care of that.

Pink noise is a great tool within the context of the bigger picture of mixing fast and accurately, and it could be a great starting (and staying) point in your mix if your room acoustics or monitors are compromised in quality. If the room is too small or untreated, using pink noise with headphones can get you in the ballpark of sound balance that can give you confidence to make mix decisions that may sound funny to you but could translate better in other listening scenarios. Someone was complaining in the likes of "why a balanced reference" and "what is a balanced reference anyway." Well, audio mixing is all about finding the balance that helps a song playback sound average in all listening environments and systems. As an artist, you can get creative all you want (and write horrible songs in trying to rediscover the wheel), but as a mixer, one should aim at averaging the sound of a tune, (adding a spark of genius along the way if at all possible).

 

Last edited: Aug 11, 2017

A fellow walks by a group of six year olds at a birthday party in a park where a clown is entertaining children with balloons. The squeaking of rubber, squeals of delight..."I want a puppy", cries the birthday girl, "It has a blue tail and pink legs!!". The guy overhears what the little girl says, stops abruptly in his tracks, turns and marches tight hipped and tighter lipped in a bee line directly over to the little girl, pushes past the clown and hovers over the now terrified child. "PUPPIES ARE NOT THE COLOR OF CRAYONS, YOU STUPID LITTLE IDIOT, IF YOU....Those are the man’s last earthly words. With all but the faint sound of a whispering whistle and a trail of blue smoke marking out it’s trajectory, a pea sized meteorite hurls down from the bright blue sky and hits the man directly on the crown of his skull. The man’s face turns slack and he crumbles down in a heap on the ground at the feet of the little girl. A solemn hush falls over the party. A few seconds tick away, but then clown with the huge smile painted on his face and his big floppy shoes hands the little girl her puppy balloon and says, “Well…who’s next?”. In unison the children all call out at once and the party continues, the children picking out their favorite animals for the clown to make in any color that they ask for, in any shape that they want. The smiles on all their little faces says it all.

Sorry. Against my own better judgment as well as my daughter's, I just couldn't help it.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 11, 2017

What a way to stop child abuse, with a bullet to the bully's head. Love the story, though it's unrelated to mixing... unless you have a loaded barrel for all the bullies around this thread.

A: I want to mix with pink noise.
B: YOU CAN'T MIX A SONG WITH THE COLOR OF CRAYONS, YOU STUPID LITTLE IDIOT, IF YOU....
A: [Metal whistling]

 

It came to me all wrapped up in a nice ribbon in that space between sleep and waking consciousness, a short reel playing out on the screen of my closed eyelids, apropos (my subconscious translation of the goings on in the thread) to the conversation though unrelated to the art of sound and mixing. However, if someone would chance to create a soundtrack to this small story it would be fine with me.

 

Hey guys,
The dude in the tutorial didn't say at what level (dB) the pink noise is supposed to be for optimal mixing headroom results. Any ideas?
This technique looks interesting at first, though. I will give it a try later.
R.

 

Last edited: Aug 11, 2017

I'd say aim for -18 dB to -14 dB, which will lead to peak meterings of about -6. That's healthy enough for proper mastering along the way. I use -18. In fact, my digital console (Allen & Heath Qu-16) comes with 0 dB fader read at -18 dB.

 

My friend, this story is genius. It's actually very inspirational.

 

Thanks.

 

On the off-chance this fellow's meant to be me & the denizens of this thread a group of 6-yr.-olds:

You've misunderstood me. Mix ... I mean Draw with whatever you wish, Lambchop don't mind. You're but six years old; plenty of time ahead of you to learn how to art.

What i did was advise the 6-yr.-old against filling the heads of his little friends with poop_passed_off_as_science, and further suggested the budding artist excersize some restraint the next time he fealt the urge to pontificate on the nature of light & puppy coloration hit him. Mebby play sum vidya instead.

We good now, Killer?

 

I am gladdened that you have come away with something that you could relate to, some nugget bound within the lines of my little story that piqued your own interest to express yourself in words. I was hoping for a musical response, though que sera. Have a pleasant day.

 

I'm going to have to try this out at some point as I now have what they call profound hearing loss.

It starts quite mild around 1KHz in the right and 700 KHz in the left ear gettin bad towards the 3KHz - 4KHz then back up to normal ish around 8KHz.............It started after being knocked out in a explosion 30 years ago or so........ for a few daze afterwards everyone sounded like a Dalek..

I've been dealing since then by boosting the (gradually worsening) knackered frequencies, but its by no means even close to perfect as my last mix posted on here can attest to

So if anyone has any specific advice I'm all ears........albeit duff ones

 

why not just use EQ matching in FabFilter Pro-Q ?

 

Gosh, Seedz, I feel for you. Although my ears have been battered and abused attending tons of concerts and standing next to hard hitting drummers and my own crazy loud amps in the time of my rock 'n roll youth, and as well my ageing tympanic membranes are not quite what they used to be, I have never been actually knocked out in an explosion. Were you in a war zone during military service when the lights went out? Fuck!

I guess you might have to depend on visual representation of sound waves in order to help you mix and/or set up mics to record. Your eyes can be your ears. I'll ask around about trying to recover some of your hearing, there might be something somewhere someone is having success.

 

I wish it were that simple tzzsmk, the results you get from a hearing test are fairly simplistic, and really only give a rough guide to the problem areas, and the resolution of the graphs they produce are pretty crude.......and remember this is all done at a specific volume which only the manufacturers of hearing aids seem to know...........so I'm left scratching my head from a Fletcher an' Munson POV.

Up till now I've used my son, who's also does a bit recording to listen to the top end of stuff I do and if its deemed to bright at a certain frequency by him then I boost my adjusted listening enviroment and try again..........not ideal, but its what I've got.

Thanks for the reply tho

 

two words : REALLY AMAZING

 

Nothing so dramatic bud, it was a dumb work accident, I was trying to get an industrial sized (size of an old fashioned steam train) gas boiler to ignite........and it did, quite spectactularly..

Like you, loud music hasn't helped, but then we never really knew back then, and I'm not entirely sure I'd change that even if I could.

And I've always had bikes, I raced Superbikes for a decade or so and I still do motocross now, an' yeah I know I'm the oldest guy on the track by 25-30 years.........anywaze the wind noise from 50 years in the saddle have not done a lot to help my hearing, so prior to to bang I had a bad case of tinitus, which got ramped up to 11 after the bang...........still its not all bad, your hearing seems to adapt and I'm able to differentiate between sounds easier than my kids can in the frequencies I've got left.......and more importantly, I'm still luvin' it.

I doubt there's any way to get it back now, and of course there's the age element to add.......I tried some of the state of the art hearing aids a couple of years ago and they did enable me to hear the missing frequencies but jeez what a crap nasty digital sound they had, and then there's the occlusion effect which is just pants.....hence no hearing aids and just EQ boosts and fixed level listening.........that way everything sounds pretty sweet.

Also with all the top rolled off curtesy of knackered lugs even todays pop pap sounds analogue

 

A musical response to a [hopefully harmless] 6-yr.-old, who waxes poetic about dropping me? Lol.

 

As a young child I loved watching you and Shari Lewis, I would never "drop" Lambchop.

As I wrote in an earlier post and will say it again, after reading through the post and then shortly falling off to sleep, the story that I put to paper was a small scene that played out in my mind in that space between waking consciousness and sleep. All I did was to document it, translate it through my creative filter to create a small bit of art. These kinds of dramas play through me every day and involve people that I do not know and in places I have never visited. It is as though I am seeing, hearing and in general, experiencing an alternate space of reality, another level of consciousness. I feel fortunate when I can remember these scenes for perhaps over 99.9% is forgotten the moment I energetically look away or upon "waking up". They are not dreams and never have anything to do with my own subconscious. I try my best to just remain an observer, and the few times that I have not heeded my own advice the energetics of the events spilled over into my waking, physical life and so I have found it in my own self interest to deflect my focus onto the events playing out. I included this tiny story in this thread because there was a strong parallel between the two story lines. There were people enjoying themselves and incorporating a new tool to use while doing something that they love, finding joy to be able to perchance accomplish something greater than they could have before, being in the moment not unlike the children in the story. Along comes someone from outside of that circle of happiness that would for seemingly selfish reasons try to harsh on their very positive experience for no other reason than to be a foil to joy in the name of truth and science. If you see yourself in the roll of the bully, so be it, but I did not write it with you in mind although it certainly bears a stiking resemblance to the line that this thread had followed. That is why I should not have posted it, because in this case art came too close to resembling the life that it mirrors. I am sorry if your feelings were hurt. Art can make one feel.

 

As it should

 

Last edited: Aug 22, 2017