Staying out of the Red, not done properly by Sander van Doorn

[dsquareddan]

Screen Shot 2014-09-19 at 7.15.37 PM.jpg

This was taken from 2:23 of his Burning Man video (which he's getting a lot of hate on for filming at burning man without peoples permission to turn it into a promotional video, something that is against the rules)

http://youtu.be/M6EzpDuUMeE?t=2m23s

This is something that drives me absolutely fucking crazy. I work in a nightclub doing lighting & visuals, and i'm situated right beside the DJ booth. The amount of "world class top DJ's" that come thru that pin the mixer to full is astounding. It's like they have no idea how sound & volume & dynamic range work.

What blows my mind is Pioneer have made this simple traffic light system for DJ's to follow. Green = you're signal is clear and accurate, Yellow = warning you shouldn't stay with your volume up here too long, go back to green, Red = STOP YOU FOOL, you are degrading the signal by having the volume up here

Most of the top DJ's i've seen that do this are amazing producers. They understand the rules of producing a song. They know what leaving headroom means, and what digital distortion sounds like. But throw them in front of a DJ mixer and it's like they forget everything.

First off, if you're in a professional nightclub, chances are, the sound doesn't go directly from the DJ mixer to the speakers. If there's an in house sound engineer then it's going to a mixing board, where he is able to gain or reduce the volume further. As the DJ, you are BEHIND the soundsystem. you have no volume perception of what it's like on the dancefloor. don't worry about it. The club is paying someone to take care of that by sitting them at that sound board and he's able to accurately tune the signal to what HE can hear on the dancefloor. if YOU need more volume, crank those Booth Monitor's as loud as you need them. but don't sacrifice the hearing & quality of your listeners on the dancefloor because it "seems" louder when you crank the DJ mixer to max. You know what happens when you do that? The sound engineer is going to reduce the incoming volume on his soundboard, and most likely throw on a compressor/limiter to stop your dumbass from blowing the speakers. When that happens you lose all the dynamic range of the track. So when you're playing your best song, buildup starts, it's loud as hell, people are feeling it, it's just about to drop, but ugh, somethings off, the drop was kind of meh, that's because the compressor squashed all dynamic range of the song so there's no room left for the song to "drop".

DJ's, PLEASE, stop turning the gains & the master volume up. you should ideally be running the mixer at 0dB, with LOTS of headroom. that way when you add an echo or reverb, there's room for the signal to go up. You should be adjusting the volume on your speakers/amplifiers/sound board if you need more volume, not the DJ mixer.

Now excuse me i'm about to go to work this friday evening and watch 5 DJ's do it all over again. it's a god damn pandemic brewed on by the "pro's" doing it and young new DJ's seeing them do it and thinking that's how it's done.

/rant

[deevey]

I find more Digital DJ's these days willing to at least "trying" to keep it out of the red than back when everything was analogue.

At festivals and big events I just came to accept that big names will more than likely run things to the max. Yes they should know better, but common sense goes out the window in the heat of the mix and moreso when you are on after 10 other jocks have been running in the red, theres no headroom left and no sound engineer willing to crank it any more lest the jock gets an itchy index finger that pushes the gains back into the red again.

I feel your pain, I used to do what you do and sit in the DJ box doing visuals and lights 5 nights a week, watching some of the biggest names in the world fuck up the audio to the point of unrecognizable and trying their damnedest to blow my eardrums while they were at it.

[Jester]

Our sound guy used to put tape over the master fader so we wouldn't do this exact thing

[Karlos Santos]

Surely pushing the mixer until it clips will only make Sander Van Doodlefarts music sound better..?

[Scalage]

He used to be a good dj, these days he's just one of the Jesus pose tribe. I saw him live at Mysteryland and wasn't impressed.

[Notanon]

When I started off learning to DJ, I had friends who worked as audio visual technicians who also DJed who I learnt from and one of the first things that was drilled into me at the start was "Keep out of the red!" Should pretty much be mandatory for all those who want to learn the art, even if it involves electroshock therapy or something similarly drastic to enforce it.

[ImNotDedYet]

Should really be part of DJing 101, but the ease of entry into DJing now and the automatic headroom provided by lots of the software used for DJing today removes the perception of many from having to do any kind of gain staging/keeping it out of the red.

[bc6]

Any half decent DJ that has been to DJ Tech Tools knows that you dont play music in the red even I do.

[dsquareddan]

it's not even "don't play in the red". it's LEAVE HEADROOM. majority of DJ's will play all yellow right up until the red. and they don't understand that when you go to mix 2 tracks together, you are summing their volumes together. when you ADD an effect, you are adding volume. even a filter ADDs resonance. you need to leave adequate headroom for these so the sound can temporarily increase safely. if you play just underneath the red, your sound has nowhere left to go but into clipping, and at that point you are not giving your audience the best experience they could get that they are paying for

[DJTroyT]

It's no better with live sound engineers in most clubs and bars. I've seen so many who clearly have had no training and understand nothing at all about gain structure, and they leave the audience's ears bleeding and they wonder why they can't fill their club/bar. Sometimes, it isn't a crappy band's fault that people are walking out, it's the engineers'.

Point being: it isn't just DJs who have this problem, but it doesn't surprise me at all that it's such a widespread issue.