The slowest and most tedious parts about mixing is that the projects you work on are disorganized with too many tracks and that setting a reference volume from within the mix tends to lead to a lot of "back and forth" as the reference itself undergoes signal processing. How Does Mixing With Pink Noise Help?Īs mentioned above, this is all about speed.
These are measured, known, and graphed in what is called the Fletcher Munson curve. There are slight peaks and dips between 1000 Hz and 24 kHz. It's perfect for when humans need to make decisions based on how things actually sound, versus taking measurements with electronic equipment like decibel meters.Īn interesting side note is that though we hear volume in the frequency spectrum in a logarithmic fashion, even that's not a perfect curve. Noise of the pink variety allows us to hear each frequency at relatively the same volume. Each successive octave may cover the same increment of frequencies or notes, but they each contain twice as many Hertz (cycles per second) as the previous octave. We hear logarithmically based on octaves. This decrease of 3 dB per octave in spectral power density is by design because humans don't hear frequencies in a linear fashion. While white noise features a constant amplitude in every frequency, the energy of pink noise decreases by three decibels for every increasing octave. Pink noise, like white noise, is random noise scattered across the entire frequency spectrum of human hearing.
And that's where pink noise mixing comes in to save the day. The problem is, when using a reference from within the mix itself, levels can change on you quickly as you start the clean up, equalizing, and especially dynamic compression phases. From there you have the main rhythm down and can start bringing up hi-hats, vocals, and other instruments on the faders. To create a "volume reference" we tend to hunt down the kick drum and bass and get them sounding great together then bring in the snare drum. You may not realize this as an organized person, but more people than not send in the most absurd projects with 50+ tracks, unlabeled and ungrouped, with zero effort in place to clean up the noise in the tracks or anything. When you receive a raw DAW project file with a song ready to be mixed, the first thing a mixing engineer will typically do is balance the levels across all of the tracks in relation to one another and pan them around.
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