Mixing with pink noise?

Why would you want pink noise in your mix?

You don't leave it in the mix, you just use it as a reference for how much energy there should be in each frequency range.

My answer is, no, I haven't tried it, what I do now works well enough. I can see it possibly being useful for a beginner or in an adverse acoustic situation.
 
What happened to just making stuff sound good?

Good monitoring and practice will give you good mixes.
 
I can't see using pink noise for doing anything other than checking speakers or
room nodes
 
Not something I've ever done...but this SoS article explains the whole thing...and it's mainly for setting level balance.
Like they mention...it appears to benefit the EDM/very high track count mixes where trying to listen to 100+ tracks playing at the same time and balancing their levels, might be a bit daunting.

Mixing To A Pink Noise Reference

This is the core of it...the "how":

So, how exactly do we make this pink noise work to our advantage when mixing? The idea is that you use a noise generator (I’ll recommend a free one in a moment) to create the pink noise, and calibrate it so that, at the stereo bus, it registers a sensible average level for mixing on your meters. With the noise level set, you solo your first source, so that it alone plays alongside the pink noise, and balance it directly against the noise by ear. You’re aiming to find the level at which the source is just barely audible above the noise, but not hidden. Then mute that source, solo the next one and repeat. And go through each and every source in the same way. Take away the noise and you’ll have your basic level mix. That’s just an overview, though. Now I’ll take you through things step-by-step.
 
One of these new fangled music is maths ideas! In a full, busy mix I guess it allows you to see 'holes' and push appropriate things, but loads of my stuff simply doesn't have a natural even spread of energy low to high. I've marked this idea one of those technically accurate but pointless exercises that newcomers read and follow blindly. So much popular music over the past 60 years would have sounded not hinging like it does using this approach.
 
These ideas are dangerous for beginners, because they may get the idea that a certain technique is essential, miss the entire point and use it as the only proper way to do it. This happens all the time and the internet, because of it's immediacy often talks about quite rare techniques that really need certain circumstances or exception equipment to make work. Apparently a similar technique is used in diagnosing performance engines when a masking signal is introduced to make engine defects stand out. The idea that you turn the level up until it just peeps out of the background, then back it off a tiny bit makes sense in physics terms, but done badly, with poorly recorded drums with little separation, it's a disaster. A little like when people tune an active crossover by looking at the crossover curves in a display, but forget that in their music this could be terrible - I remember the disco era with bass playing octaves and sometimes a crossover would place the bottom note in one speaker and the octave in another and as the bass player played the song - the bass sound field moved around very strangely coming from the subs, then the bottom of the main stack, then back again. It looked good, but sounded plain weird simply because they forgot the music content wouldn't work!
 
It takes time and practice to learn how to mix. If you aren't interested in putting in the effort, have someone who is interested mix your songs.

Most of the shortcuts that I've seen discussed are, at best, a crutch and at worst, a waste of time that keeps you from actually getting better.
 
Most of the shortcuts that I've seen discussed are, at best, a crutch and at worst, a waste of time that keeps you from actually getting better.

The abundance of these "tricks" and new approaches to recording have pretty much increased along with the rise in home recording...not to mention, that everyone feels the need to post up a YouTube "how to" video the minute they think they've had some "EUREKA!" moment in their studio. :D

Most of it has to do with some need for speed...which I find puzzling in the home/project studio environment for the majority. There's an obsession with "shortcuts"...everyone wants to reduce processes and techniques down to a single mouse click if possible.
I don't know why people are so bothered by doing the few needed steps for the right approach, and instead they want it simplified further...dumb it down to a single button if you can.

There was a conversation just the other day on another forum about the "bother" of having to click through a couple of sub-menus. Someone was saying it really slowed them down....?...and I was confused what exactly was their need to rush and get through it real quick.
This was not some commercial by-the-clock situation.
I always tell people that I like to take my time and I move slowly in the studio. :)
 
I get why people want professional results. I don't get why people feel that there is some sort of shortcut to getting those results.

If you are one of those people who don't want to get caught up in the process, then you aren't the type of person that should be mixing.

Just because you are a musician, songwriter, etc... doesn't mean you have to be a mix engineer.
 
Most of it has to do with some need for speed...
I always tell people that I like to take my time and I move slowly in the studio. :)

My backlog is 15 years long, and I only have so much free time to record. I'm always looking for tricks to help me record faster!
(Ironically, I'll often spend an entire day working on a fix that will maybe save me 30 minutes.)
 
My backlog is 15 years long, and I only have so much free time to record. I'm always looking for tricks to help me record faster!
(Ironically, I'll often spend an entire day working on a fix that will maybe save me 30 minutes.)

I have got a backlog too...but I've not noticed that reducing my mouse clicks has helped to reduce the backlog! :D
For me it's been more about having extended time in the studio...rather than finding some computer shortcut that saves me 5 seconds.
Oh, I think we all develop and refine our workflow to streamline it as much as possible without even thinking "I need some shortcuts"...but I think there's a lot to be said for taking your time, and absorbing the details more slowly.

I don't get much done when I have shorter periods available to me for the studio...not matter how fast I try to move.
A couple of hours here and there was never very productive time for me. I'll mostly putz around trying to be productive...but I don't accomplish much.
My best time in the studio is when I can spend days without much interruption...just become immersed in the whole process. Something I haven't been doing much for the last couple of years for one reason or another...but that's all changing now. I will have endless time at my disposal, and I hope to clear out some of the backlog...and maybe even find some new shortcuts for the computer.
 
I just had to cut up an hour and a half long tracking session into what ended up being 54 individual "songs", and I needed them trimmed and faded and gapped and if it took me more than an hour, I'd be doing it for free. Found a way to come really close with a couple clicks, then cleaned things up a bit by ear, then a couple more clicks and render. Shortcuts like that can be nice. :)

The pink noise thing doesn't make sense to me. It is true that many of the best mixes will approximate pink noise when the spectrum is integrated over the full piece. But that's because there's stuff spread all over the frequency spectrum. This method could work if the arrangement is actually decent and there isn't much overlap in the various tracks' spectrums, but it does nothing to stop you from just piling a bunch of stuff on in one spot. At the extreme, say you four tracks of 1KHz sine waves. Mix those each against the noise, then mixing them together and take away the noise and you've just got a really loud 1K sine wave.
 
I just had to cut up an hour and a half long tracking session into what ended up being 54 individual "songs"
...
if it took me more than an hour, I'd be doing it for free.

It seems your problem is that you're expecting to get paid doing grindcore! :D
 
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