For those of you who dabble in the world of DAWs, you may have heard of a technique that is alleged to get you up and running with a pretty well balanced mix with minimal effort. It is called the Pink Noise technique.
Essentially, you load all your tracks into the time line of your daw and set the faders to the lowest they will go. Ie: no sound! You then generate a pink noise signal (or use a pre-recorded sample of one). In Cubase Pro, there is a handy noise generator! Anyway, set the noise generator to output at about -12db or something to give yourself plenty of headroom
So, while this pink noise is playing, select a track and bring the volume fader up so that you can just hear it below the pink noise. Once done, mute the track and continue to the next one.
Simply put, there are no shortcuts to a good balance
When you’ve done all the tracks, turn off the pink noise and un-mute everything. The result should be a fairly well balanced mix.
Now, I have to say, that this technique does kind of work. But getting from start to finish of the initial set up is a horrible business. When you have loads of tracks, it takes time and is unpleasant on the ears. I find it far quicker to balance things manually. I mean, I can balance the levels of a 5 minute song in the time it takes to play the song through! Imagine doing that for a 20 minute epic!!!!
When I saved my pink noise mix and then compared it to my manual mix, the manual mix was way better – had more dynamism and all that sort of stuff!
Anyway, as an experiment, it was interesting; but I won’t be using the technique again.
Simply put, there are no shortcuts to a good balance.
And, of course, I may have totally misunderstood how it works!