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

Off-Topic / Lounge
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Staying out of the Red, not done properly by Sander van Doorn

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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)

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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On a side note, as someone who is colourblind, how hard would it be to use RGB LEDs in place of the current red, yellow and green standalone LEDs used in some mixers so that DJs who have colour vision issues can adjust the colours of the LED feedback strips next to each channel fader and the master fader to better discern the levels by colour and not accidentally venture above 0dB gain? In my case, some green LEDs can be confused with yellow ones, so I wouldn’t really know if I’m getting a bit too close to the red or not without squinting at the levels (one thing I absolutely loathe about the Pioneer mixers, at least NI have the sense to use blue and red to better differentiate this). Could be just a simple switch at the back or the front for each setting, doesn’t need to be overly complicated.

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That’s completely unnecessary. the dB values are written on the side. that sucks you are colorblind, but manufactures are not going put in a feature for a minority that just adds cost.

Last night I worked a DnB show for a guy named Black Sun Empire. Amazing DJ, kept his levels where I told him to, was loud as fuck in the club, lots of dynamic range, and crystal clear on our in house PK Sound system.

Tonight, Simon Patterson. what a douchebag. redlining EVERY channel, booth pinned to full, master just under redlining (but still distorted as fuck cause each channel was clipping). asked me to move the booth monitors 2 feet closer to his ears. downs a bottle of grey goose to himself while he DJs. It sounded like fucking shit tonight. it doesn’t matter how good of a sound engineer you have, if the signal coming out the mixer is shit, you can’t polish a turd. Fucking sick of seeing this. I could literally make a list of 150 “top dj’s” i’ve worked for that don’t obey the rules of gain structuring. they’re fucking deaf, and they don’t give a shit about their audiences ears. I wish I could make DJ’s sign a waiver that says they are liable to be sued for hearing damage if they redline. sorry for the cursing, i’m just mad I had to sit thru 2 hours of distortion

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I think everyone just needs to realize that every sound system is different. some are going to be worse than others. you just have to play within that sound systems limits if you want it to be the “best audio experience” possible for your listeners. once you try to go past that, you are no longer giving the best show you could possibly give. DJ’s need to start giving a crap about quality. playing lossless files, not redlining, no spinbacks (seriously they sound great in a radio show, but sound awful at 120dB amplified. it’s a sound man’s worst nightmare)

We need a Gordon Ramsey for DJ’s. just gets in the booth and yells at the DJ “Oi you little shit, waddafuq u think u doin m8? does that sound clear to you? is your head on straight you wanker?”

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Yeah, it wasn’t too bad on my old Numark DXM-09, but when I play out on something like a DJM-800 or whatever Pioneer mixer the club or bar seems to use, it does frustrate me a bit as the green LEDs they use look too close to the yellow LEDs used before hitting the red, particularly if I’m glancing in the dark and can’t make out the dB markings clearly. If they were the same type as used in traffic lights which are a bit closer to white to me, I wouldn’t have a problem as I can distinguish those ones a bit more clearly, but not much I can do about that. Would be nice to have it in something like a DJM-2000 Nexus Mk2 or something similarly high-end, not really expecting it in entry-level equipment.

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I’d be probably a much easier task to list the “Top Dj’s” that did obey the rules :smiley:

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the other simple solution is that 0db on pioneer mixers is exactly halfway up the VU meter. there’s 9 Green LED’s, 4 Yellow & 2 Red. if you can’t notice you’ve gone 4 LED’s over the midway point until it gets to red…well i dunno how to help you from there

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also, because I know this is going to come up in this thread, the answer to the question “well what if the guy before me was playing with the volume up really high?”

The answer is that you go talk to the sound guy before your set, and you make it clear that you are going to bring the volume level down, and that he should bring it UP on his soundboard to compensate. Let him know that you will stay at the volume for the entirety of your set. but you MUST do as you say. if you bring it back up, the sound engineer is just going to throw a compressor/limiter on your signal

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I would watch that show.

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I would watch the shit out of it.

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what most people don’t seem to know is that modern pio mixer are far from clipping even when you are full on in the red.