My Love Affair with Pink Noise

My Love Affair with Pink Noise

I have a music project on my computer called "The Sound Lab". It's basically where I play around with stuff, outside of making songs. A sandpit of sorts.

The stuff I've done in The Sound Lab includes playing around with:

• Comparing results of different guitar effects, amplifier and speaker cabinet simulators
• Merging of different drum samples
• Poly-rhythmic beats

All this stuff sometimes generates ideas which go onto making songs.

WTF is Pink Noise?

Pink noise is static noise - but it's a special kind of static noise. As I understand it, it follows your ear in that it sounds the same volume at the lowest frequencies, as it does the highest frequencies.Wikipedia says:

In pink noise, each octave (halving/doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy. ... There is equal energy in all octaves of frequency. ... At high enough frequencies pink noise is never dominant. (White noise has equal energy per frequency interval.)

White noise on the other hand, which is also static noise, is completely random and dominant at higher frequencies as hiss. Anyway, that's how I understood it. Here's a link to a pink noise MP3.

And...?

So why is this even relevant? Well, a few weeks back I discovered that pink noise is used by some people when mixing songs. They basically adjust volume levels of each instrument until it's hidden behind the pink noise, to ensure that nothing is over-powering the frequency range.

So I tried it, and it kinda works. I use it as a measurement for each of my mixing stages. At the moment (and this may change as I learn new stuff), I gain-stage all my raw recordings to about -18dB of pink noise. I do the same at mixing, gain-staging post-FX levels to about -9dB of pink noise. These are just rule of thumbs and as I learn more about mixing, I might change things around a bit.

Full Audio Spectrum Analysis

Below you can see comparisons of some tracks I recorded - rhythm guitars, bass, drums and pink noise. Before any mixing or effects processing has occurred, you can see how each instrument  slightly overlaps into each other's space. This means I need to filter (scoop) gaps into the tracks during mixing, so you'll be able to hear each instrument clearer overall.

Spectrum analysis of rhythm guitars (green), bass (blue), drums (magenta) and pink noise (purple)

But more importantly using pink noise gave me an idea for doing other stuff. I love my science and I love empirical evidence. And as I entered into this new world of digital audio effects, amplifier and speaker cabinet simulators, I needed something to be able to compare against.

After playing heavy metal in a garage the size of a very small car for years, my hearing is going downhill fairly quickly, so that wasn't something good to use to compare anything with. But this pink noise, it was perfect. I could pump pink noise into anything and see what the output looks like.

Below is a graphic of a renowned amplifier simulator called LePou's LeXTAC. LeXTAC has three input channels,

• Ch 1 (Clean/Yellow): gain, bass, middle, treble, contour, power amp gain volume, 3 positions pre eq, gain boost.
• Ch 2 & Ch 3 (Blue & Red): gain, bass, middle, treble, contour, power amp gain, volume, 3 positions pre eq, gain-structure, gain boost and plexi mode.

Comparing LePou's LeXTAC Red (green), Blue (blue) and Yellow (magenta) channels to pink noise (purple)

At the default settings, you can see the Clean/Yellow channel (magenta) is significantly louder than the Red and Blue and maintains the bass frequencies better than the other two. Even if I drop the overall volume of the Yellow channel, I'll still need to consider louder bass and treble response.

To be perfectly clear, this was all relative. I wasn't expecting to take measurements or rely on concrete data. It was a simply a way to say "these amp sim channels drops the bass and follow the pink noise curve, while this one is flatter and has more bass and treble".

Comparing to your Favourite Songs

The other thing you can do is compare it to your favourite songs. One of my all-time favourites is Nine Inch Nails, The Wretched. It goes through a number of themes, but my favourite bit starts at 1:48. It has all these weird effects, vocal effects, the beat. Here is the spectrum analysis of this song part compared to pink noise.

Comparing Nine Inch Nails The Wretched to pink noise

Don't get me wrong, frequency spectrum analysis isn't the only thing that makes a song. Mid / Side separation would play a huge part, as I'm sure a bunch of other factors - but this is a simple way to see how the mix "looks" when comparing it to your own mixes.

My Virtual Drum Kit

My Virtual Drum Kit

So once I had decided that I wanted to write music on my own, one of the things I had to do was get a good sounding drum setup. Now I'm renowned for being cheap - and that's ok, a badge of honour of sorts! So I went looking for a way to get an amazing sounding set of drums at no cost.

Manda Audio MT Power Drum Kit 2

The first place to start is Manda Audio's MT Power Drum Kit 2!

Manda Audio's MT Power Drum Kit 2

Now, this free plugin comes with a great sounding drums, don't get me wrong. But the absolutely best thing about this plugin is the Grooves Library.

MT Power Drum Kit Groove Library

Basically, hundreds of drum grooves and their associated fill-ins. Sure it's not death metal, but it's an amazing start when you're fleshing out ideas.

Make it Thicker

So I liked the sound coming out of MT Power Drum Kit 2, but I recalled one of my favorite YouTubers Mr Bill, (whose tutorials taught me a lot about Ableton Live) had this one video about layering sounds. And I felt that was what was missing. It needed more substance. So I kept looking.

SM Drums

SM Drums is around 2.6 GB's worth of free drum samples. It's a treasure trove! So I downloaded away. While I looked around the website for other tidbits, I found a reference to The Metal Kick Drum site.

These samples come in a variety of recordings of the same hit, at the same velocity - these are called Round-Robins. These samples are randomly selected at play time to give a more realistic, less robotic sound to the beat.

The other aspect of these samples is the varieties of velocities of hits on the same item. For example, the intensity of hitting a cymbal might be recorded at 48 different levels. In addition, these might be performed across 4 round-robins. This is why there are so many samples. But it was all worth it in the end.

SM Drums 1960's Ludwig Oyster Blue Pearl Drum Kit

The Metal Kick Drum

The Metal Kick Drum has a bunch of metal kick, snare and tom samples, as well as other tidbits. So I downloaded another 270 MB of drums samples, ready to combine them with the SM Drums cymbals pack, and I was ready to go.

The Metal Kick Drum

Combining It All

So now I was ready to make the kit. I'm not going to go into detail on how I made it here. I'll be happy to create another post if people want the details, but suffice to say, I combined all the samples, round-robins, velocities, etc. and mixed it all together. All in its layered glory. I've added some samples below so you can hear the differences.
Disclaimer - these are unprocessed (dry) audio files, don't expect them to blow your mind.

So here is a sample made from just MT Power Drum Kit.

And here is the sample made from the hybrid SM Drums / TMKD Drum Kits.

And lastly the combined sample made from all SM Drums, TMKD and MT Power Drum Kits.

Inside the DAW

For those still curious as to what this setup looks like inside my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), which in this instance is Abletons Live, I've got some screenshots for you. Again, if you like this stuff and want to see more details or a video on how it's put together - let me know in the comments.

Drum MIDI Setup

Drum MIDI Setup

You can see how I've pieced together the drums from the MTPDK2 groove library. Once they are in the DAW, you can edit away. I try to keep my own personal library of modified grooves for future reference. The Original MIDI channel is originally from the library. It already sounds like a human is playing it because the velocities and timings aren't perfectly timed or consistent in intensity. I continue to modify these beats until I'm happy.

SM Drum / TMKD Setup

TMKD Kick Setup

Above shows the TMKD Kick setup and how the 6 samples are randomly selected, to get a different sample everytime. You can actually see it in the Hihat picture, but the LFO2 is used for random selection.

SM Drums Hihat Open Setup

The SM Drums samples were a bit more complicated. They had a number of round-robins as well as a huge variety of  velocities. It gave a much richer choice of sounds, but did take a while to setup. You can see in the picture above, the Open Hihat not only had a number of round-robins, but 14 levels of velocity.

MT Power Drum Kit 2 Setup

The MTPDK2 needed some configuration tweaking in the setup I wanted. As I wanted to sum (combine) the individual drum tracks from both kits, I needed redirect them. The screenshot below shows each of the group being redirected to an OUT channel, which I then recombine later.

MT Power Drum Kit 2 Setup

If you look closely, you can see Kicks to Out 2, Snares to Out 3, etc.

Channels

In this last picture, you can see looking from left to right:

• Drums MIDI - The MIDI channels
• Drums TMKD - The SM Drums / TMKD hybrid drum kit, with each track being redirected/summed at Drums Track channel
• Drums MT-PowerKit - The MT Power Drum Kit 2 with each of the drum groups directed to their own channel and then summed at Drums Track channel
• Drums Track - This is where all the individual Kick, Snare, Hihat, Tom and Ride/Cymbal tracks are summed together.

Drums Track is what I record from to emulate recording mic'd drums in a studio. You'll note - there are no effects on these channels. It is raw sampled drum sounds.

I do this other trick where I create synthesised Overhead and Room Mic recordings, but I'll leave for another blog post.

Let me know if you found any of this interesting in the comments. If you have any questions or suggestions for future blog posts, let me know.

Djent, 8 Strings and an old Metal Guitarist

Djent and an old Metal Guitarist

It's been just under twenty years since I stood on a stage and played metal to a crowd. The last mosh-pit I entered was around early 2000's when the Deftones came to visit the University Roundhouse here in Sydney. I would have been in my late 20's with all these 18 year old Uni students - and let me tell you, I felt old then! Sure I was in there going hard, but you could see the look on all their faces - "the old dude". And the Deftones, shit - they ain't spring chickens either right, but hey there was a glimmer of hope for me yet.

Slow Learner

About five years ago, a work colleague of mine, who helped get me obsessed with Nine Inch Nails (oh yeah, we saw them live too), introduced me to Meshuggah and Mastodon. Strangely enough, at the time I didn't quite get them. There was something about the sound that didn't sit with me. And this isn't the first time I've had this happen. It took me over twenty years to get "into" Black Sabbath! Twenty fricken years to work out I really loved Black Sabbath (at least the old stuff anyway). So I'm a slow learner, I get that.

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (1970)

WTF is "Djent"?

So what the hell is Djent? Well, after watching many, many YouTube videos on the latest metal guitarist riffs and techniques, I started saying to myself "What is that sound they have? How do they make the guitars sound like that? And why can't I for the life of me get my guitar to sound like that!" I had forgotten all about my introduction to Meshuggah at this stage. But eventually, I figured out that this sound, the sound I couldn't get, was what the youth of today called "Djent".

If I wanted to get technical about it, there were quite a few reasons why I couldn't get that sound. In no particular order, this is why.

Detune or go for 7/8 Strings

I only had a six string guitars. I have never detuned my guitars and therefore never experienced playing on anything lower than the standard E tuning. It was always a bridge too far (pun?) for my thinking. These guys were playing chords whose root notes started way lower than what my guitar could get too.

Extended Power Chords

From what I can tell, Djent uses extended power chords. A power chord is just root-fifth-octave. They say Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi invented the power chord when he lost the tips of the middle and ring finger of his right hand in a factory accident. He also went on to detune his guitar (all the way to C#) to ease the tension on his fingers. And that there is the birth of metal. And it took me twenty years to figure that out - OMFG... Anyway, Djent due to additional bass strings and potential detuning may add a lower octave and fifth below what would normally be the root, giving a much thicker richer sound which you will read below causes it's own issues.

The Mid-Range

Well, back when I was a lad, I was Mr Anti-Mid-Range! The tone knobs on my Marshall JCM800 had the Mid at zero! I wanted no mid-range at all! My distortion pedal, the 90's infamous Boss Metal Zone MT-2 also had the mid down at zero.

So twenty years later, playing with my usual setup - there was no way in the world I was going to get that Djent sound - because it's all mids! You see, without mids, playing an extended power chord sounds fucking terrible. It's muddy, its a mess, there's no clarity, no crispness, no nothing. So once again, YouTube to the rescue, I had to watch a couple of people setup their amps for Djent to work out what I was doing wrong. And mid-range is a significant piece missing from the puzzle.

The 8 String

So once I worked it out - I go out and find myself a "cost-effective" 8 string guitar. I found a second-hand Ibanez RG8, with the old style (non-EMG) pickups. It was a great start as I entered the modern metal arena.

My Ibanez RG8

And so began my Djent journey.

The Resurrection

The Resurrection

So I recently started writing music again. After a 18 year hiatus, my old band asked me if I'd like to join the fun and start writing again. There was a small problem - I live in Australia and they were back in Malta. But we gave it a shot anyway. And the result was a resurrection of my passion for writing heavy metal.

Back to Metal

Had my old band not reached out to me recently, I might have taken a lot longer to return to metal. I was playing around with a cheap bass guitar, experimenting with extremely basic jazz techniques, looking for where my passions lie. And as usual, all along, it was right there in front of me - the thing I knew best, good ol' metal.

With the renewed attempt to put the band back together, we wrote a couple of new songs, which was fantastic to get my creative juices flowing again - but, it couldn't last while I was located on the other side of the world. But now I was hooked! I wanted to write again, I wanted to create my own kinda metal. The question was, how? And thankfully I had hundreds of young musicians and artists who had already blazed the trail for me to follow.

The World has Changed

Our self-funded CD back in 1995

The world had moved on since the late nineties. When we released a CD back in 1995, we were looking for a record label, self funding our own CD, buying a very expensive small amount of studio time to record our songs. Today, it was all at my fingertips. With a few hundred dollars, I could record my stuff at home, mix and publish it. And this wasn't bleeding edge - artists on the Internet had been doing this for over a decade already, so I just had to follow in the footsteps of musicians 20 years my junior to enjoy this new world.

Tutorials Everywhere

And the tutorials! When I started looking around a couple of years back, I was thinking "How can you learn anything from YouTube? Whatever happened to simple text based instructions!" - well, how wrong was I! I have spent literally days watching YouTube, learning everything from how to record songs, mix your songs, adjust your guitar action, write your own drums in MIDI, etc. etc. etc.

It's a new world and I had to embrace it. So here I am, giving it a shot at the overripe age of 44.

And this is my journey!