I like to keep my mind open, but not so open my brains fall out. This pink noise thing sounds suspiciously like a "brains falling out" kind of idea.

audiokid : Here is today 10'x20' wall to wall 1 or 2'' foam winner ;) :

(EDIT: typos and clarification edits)

pcrecord, post: 454873, member: 46460 wrote: audiokid : Here is today 10'x20' wall to wall 1 or 2'' foam winner ;) :

Thanks for posting. I'll share a bit of info on how I use a dead room.

I enjoy mixing and producing certain styles of music in dead rooms. My new studio has a live room and a dead room like that, but quite a bit larger too.:)
For virtual studio work, composing and building ideas ITB, rooms like that work well, especially if you have a Bricasti or a good ITB reverb. I like combining the realism of Bricasti with Eventide.

For 3.5 decades, I've always used sequencers and samplers together with real guitars and vocals to earn a living in music. I have a legit reason that dead works. Its not smoke blowing out my ;)
I much prefer the sound of dead rooms even though I love and grew up on Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk and so many 70's rock bands that are all about live drums... In fact, I was a drummer before I was a guitarist. But... I saw an opportunity decades ago and it included everything about dead rooms and virtual emulation.

So, I would use a drum config like that to trigger virtual drums. I much prefer the MPC though but I have dabbled into drum replacement and augmenting poor live sounding drums and that is really cool to me.

Unless I was tracking live drums, dead rooms are better for producing certain styles of music compared to a bad live room. Granted, too dead and you need to adjust your ears, mixes for high freq suction.
But on that token, my high freq hearing has dropped so a dead room helps me tolerate sitting closer and concentrating better for longer duration's. Its what you get used to as well. I guess..

never the less... from a creative POV, I much prefer a dead room most of the time, even when playing live. I used to love playing loud as hell in dark cozy lounges. My lighting looked awesome and the PA kicked ass. You can really slam the bass without ever seeing people screaming to talk. Meaning, the high freq were absorbed so the bass always sounded bigger and less boomy.

I know I'm the odd guy out on RO for this but I would guess the majority of people combining samplers and electronics around real guitars and vocals see this as "dope".
Add a few Bricasti's and dead gets 'real' fun.
Vocal tracking, you do need to use headphones all the time because the world all lives ITB, inside the world of Bricasti.
The sound you can produce in dead rooms is very different to the live room sound but not in a negative way.

just another way of creating

I've done the opposite too - a little boxy music practice room in a college - people before me had tamed the horrible reflections, and it was a bit dull, and a bit strange to be in - with the small size, but dead acoustics. I saw a proper pre-fab studio room that had built in reverb, so I knocked the idea and put a flush boundary mic into one wall, fed it through the wet output of a spare reverb unit, and did the same the other end on the other channel - a small amp and a speaker in each corner, and it sounded amazing for people to practice flutes and strings in - hardly any volume through this system but made the room sound gorgeous and like being in a big space.

audiokid, post: 454882, member: 1 wrote: just another way of creating

To be honest, it takes a lot of resources to build a pro level live room.
While I have a nicely treated mixing space ( which also doubles nicely for vocal and acoustic overdubs) I don't have the resources needed to build a great sounding live room. I've had them in the past, both A.I.R. Studios locations that I operated out of from 1988 to 2004 had good sounding live performance spaces...but I also had a full time bevy of consistent clients who were happy to pay my hourly and/or block rate during that era. Those days are gone; and any investment I would make from a business perspective would need to pay for itself (like it used to), and I'm not sure that would be the case anymore. Besides the country being choked with home studios charging next to nothing, I also have to face the fact that I'm now in my mid 50's, and to the majority of younger clients, I'd just be the square old guy who has no idea of the music they want to make and mixes they are after.
This whole thing was a roundabout way of saying that recording in dead sounding spaces and then adding artificial space, is a lot easier (and a lot less expensive) than designing and constructing a great sounding live room,that's also big enough to track full bands in.
I have no problems at all tracking "dead" these days, and then adding different spaces and rooms artificially. If I need a large space to do an all "track at once" session, then I can rent outs local studio that has one, or, rent out something like a church during the week.
Either one is a lot less expensive than building a performance area that might end up getting used half a dozen times in a year..., not to mention heating (or cooling) it.
;)

I work in a home studio with average gear and very little acoustic treatment. I used the pink noise technique on my last project as way to get my starting mix and found it very helpful. Within minutes I had baseline to begin my mix against. I raised the level on each individual track till they were just audible with the vocal a little louder. Yes, it is hard on the ears even at low volumes. I also use a spectrum analyzer plugin as well.

If you're struggling with a mix or just want a new perspective I would give it a try. I found using pink noise I can achieve mixes on inexpensive speakers that hold up more consistently on a wide variety of systems (car, computer, hyped Beats headphones, etc.).

YJG, post: 455060, member: 51101 wrote: I work in a home studio with average gear and very little acoustic treatment. I used the pink noise technique on my last project as way to get my starting mix and found it very helpful. Within minutes I had baseline to begin my mix against. I raised the level on each individual track till they were just audible with the vocal a little louder. Yes, it is hard on the ears even at low volumes. I also use a spectrum analyzer plugin as well.

If you're struggling with a mix or just want a new perspective I would give it a try. I found using pink noise I can achieve mixes on inexpensive speakers that hold up more consistently on a wide variety of systems (car, computer, hyped Beats headphones, etc.).

I'm glad you found this usefull. We all have our sets of training, aptitudes and experiences. There is no right and wrong as long as the end products works ;)

dvdhawk Kurt Foster audiokid pcrecord , Boswell paulears bouldersound
et al...

I finally tried it, just to keep an open mind about it, and so that I would be able to give my opinion based on experience and not hypothesis. My summary is that it wasn't the least bit useful to me in getting an initial static mix.
If the tracks are well-recorded to begin with, if you have a well-treated room, good monitors and fresh ears, then it takes virtually no time to get a static mix.
There was a serious downside - I found that doing it actually fatigued my ears much quicker.
If you are working under "normally accepted conditions" for pro audio production - decent treatment, good monitors, fresh ears, knowledge of gain structure, and experience - then getting a static mix should be virtually effortless, and take no more than 15 minutes for a basic 16-24 track project... 30 minutes, tops.
This seems like a sort of Band-Aid - and not really even a good one - in an effort to futilely try to "fix" inadequacies; a pointless workaround to handle weaknesses in other very critical areas of their recording/mixing rig - things that, frankly, should be taken care of and corrected before someone refers to their home set-up as a "studio".
That being said, people need to do what they feel is best, and what they feel works for them.
I tried it, I didn't like it - or find it useful in anyway - and in fact, it caused aural fatigue to set in much sooner than what I would normally encounter.
IMO.
-d.

Yup, well said, Donny.

I find that pink noise can occasionally be useful, either in preparation for a mix, or for setting up a live PA system, but really only where there is a big discrepancy between the start point and where you hope to end up. It's not going to achieve much in a good mix room.

Think of pink noise in the same way as third-octave filters (graphic equalisers): can be used for taming horror frequencies in a live hall, but has very little use in a well-behaved studio.

I took the plunge last night and used pink noise to level my main nearfields. I’ve now matched my left and right and my Apollo quad and Presonus monitor v2 all at 78db on my spl meter. The result is actually quite striking in my less than ideal smallish room. I don’t ever just rely on my ears anyway, but, I could hear a big image change in a song I’m currently working on.

Tonal plug-in tells me all is well anyway, but, my ears perked right up. I don’t think I had a huge difference in left or right input adjustments on the back of the mackies to do, but I did them, and it works, for me. As Donny always says YMMV :).

Tony

Makzimia, post: 455268, member: 48344 wrote: I took the plunge last night and used pink noise to level my main nearfields. I’ve now matched my left and right and my Apollo quad and Presonus monitor v2 all at 78db on my spl meter. The result is actually quite striking in my less than ideal smallish room. I don’t ever just rely on my ears anyway, but, I could hear a big image change in a song I’m currently working on.

Tonal plug-in tells me all is well anyway, but, my ears perked right up. I don’t think I had a huge difference in left or right input adjustments on the back of the mackies to do, but I did them, and it works, for me. As Donny always says YMMV :).

Tony

Hmm... It would interesting to hear how this translates in a before/ after mix of something.

Keep in mind audiokid, it’s not fool proof. And in addition, it’s a single position, the triangulation spot of the speakers. You’re placing the spl meter where your head would be. As I said YMMV :).

Tony

I think there's something that goes on in either the brain or the ears with short duration pink noise. I will often use pink noise in the final stage of an installation, and a minute or two at a moderate volume seems oddly refreshing to me. It's almost the equivalent of a palette cleanse, but more than a few minutes and I find it downright fatiguing. Whether it's the pure endorphin response in relief when it's finally over, or whether it really resets something sensory, I don't know. And I may be the only one who experiences it this way. Loud / startling / unpleasant noises will certainly trigger our fight or flight response, phase 1 of that is a rush of endorphins. So I wonder if any portion of the positive response to the mix after the pink noise method is attributable to a surge in endorphins.

Just thinking out loud.... carry on.

mmmmm ...... endorphins ..... aggggh!

You get what I'm saying though, right? Breathing the air in Bejing would be a welcome relief compared to having your head held underwater.

dvdhawk, post: 455278, member: 36047 wrote: I think there's something that goes on in either the brain or the ears with short duration pink noise. I will often use pink noise in the final stage of an installation, and a minute or two at a moderate volume seems oddly refreshing to me. It's almost the equivalent of a palette cleanse, but more than a few minutes and I find it downright fatiguing. Whether it's the pure endorphin response in relief when it's finally over, or whether it really resets something sensory, I don't know. And I may be the only one who experiences it this way. Loud / startling / unpleasant noises will certainly trigger our fight or flight response, phase 1 of that is a rush of endorphins. So I wonder if any portion of the positive response to the mix after the pink noise method is attributable to a surge in endorphins.

Just thinking out loud.... carry on.

"Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?"
"Because it feels so good when I stop!"
;)

Mike Caliri, post: 454566, member: 49529 wrote: Turn down all the faders,play the noise and turn up each fader until you can hear it over the noise,seen a video on youtube about it.

This is similar to the suggestion of running a cheap noisy window air conditioner in the control room while mixing; in either case the noise source provides "analog dither for your brain"

:::facepalm:::

I'll pass.

:ROFLMAO:

As I mentioned previously, I tried it, I went in with an open mind. I'm always happy to hear and consider new ideas. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have ever tried half the things I've learned over the years that ended up being positive and effective methods.
But this "method" didn't work for me, (and I don't think it's a "method" at all).
If anything, I think it caused ear fatigue a lot sooner... and I wasn't even monitoring all that hot, either, probably around 73-75db or so.
I can't imagine trying it at levels hotter than that.
Getting a decent initial static mix isn't really hard if you have raw tracks that sound good to begin with, and when mixing in a nicely balanced room through decent monitors.
Anyway... I tried it, and (for me) there was absolutely no value to it.
FWIW

This pink noise technique got attention for a while and I just didn't hear about it since this morning with this video :

The thing is if it's poorly recorded just how good can you fix it in mixing or is it poop in poop out.

Surely, this just proves that mixing is never set the faders, and go and have a coffee while the track plays - there entire thing is so flawed as to be useless - why do we spend an hour blending things? Little pushes and pulls on the faders to get the important bits up for their critical bit, then you lose them on purpose when other things take over. Imagine a recording with a voice over - this is the real world style activity, where you have to create a hole for it, and then it can be heard. Exactly the same as when that saxophone comes in for those ten really important notes - that section needs to be louder than the rest. This experiment proves that all it does is work for tracks with NO dynamic range changes start to finish. Set the drum level, and then, like in the example, they dominate for the entire song. A piano chord will always sound louder than a piano melody line, so the two would need balancing against each other.

I think whoever started this ridiculous mix philosophy was very clever, and now we have newbies reading it and thinking that is how you mix? Everyone who has ears, knows how this approach is just so terrible. If you tried to automate the peeping above the noise and dropping back down it would be even worse. The thing revolves around the notion that every source in a mix needs to be the same level - it just doesn't. Sometimes, musicians play quieter on purpose. Imagine how it would work on old style jazz with solos? Is this not like using the old fashioned ALC on every channel or compressing everything and then limiting at the hiss point.

I'm convinced now - it's simply rubbish! Are we sure it didn't start on April fools day?

Mike Caliri, post: 456721, member: 49529 wrote: The thing is if it's poorly recorded just how good can you fix it in mixing or is it poop in poop out.

It is true to some extent. But even the best recording needs to be mixed properly. If you were to mix 20 perfectly recorded tracks, nothing says they will fit together without some work.
If recorded properly, most tracks will contain more than required to mix. Let me explain: If I record an acoustic guitar correctly, there is a good chance I will need to make some cut in the low end when mixing.
Of course one could EQ/mix in the way in. But everything the person does can't be undone...
Anyway, as I said earlier, everyone needs to find the best way to achieve a good sound and should stick to it ! ;)