It's actually a gold coin, but what's more interesting about the Nobel prize is the place where it's given...

The Nobel prize ceremony is held in the Blue Hall of Stockholm's City Hall.

But what's weird about the Blue Hall is that it's ACTUALLY RED?!?

Not only is the Blue Hall actually decorated with red brick, but the bricks are even chiseled down to make them look imperfect!

Silly Swedes...

When I went to Sweden a few years ago, I actually saw this "Blue Hall" with my own eyes.

And yep....blue hall is real red...

As our tour guide told us, which is corroborated by Wikipedia:

"The hall was originally supposed to have been plastered and painted blue, a color scheme that would have resembled the water of the bay. But Östberg [the architect] changed his mind during the construction of the hall after he saw the red brick. Though Östberg abandoned his blue design in favour of the unfinished red brick, the name "Blue Hall" was already in general use and stuck." -Wikipedia, (brackets mine).

Identity Crises of architects aside, what astounded me more was what the tour guide told us next.

When the brick was put in, it looked too new for the feel of the room. So, in order to make everything old and regal, the workers were commissioned to chisel the bricks down to get a weathered old look to them.

And because of how my brain works, this instantly reminded me of how we use saturation to make pristine tracks sound grittier.

When we're mixing, not everything should be clean and pristine. If we're going for grittiness, saturation helps us get the feel we're going for.

We might have a perfectly recorded vocal sound that's clean and bright, but for some reason that type of sound doesn't fit the genre of the music.

So, we add some tape saturation and dirty up the low-mids and smooth out the high-end transients, making it grittier while fitting into the mix better.

So the next time you need to replace your beautiful blue track with some raunchy reds, slap that saturation plug-in on and see if you can't get the grit you're going for.

And don't forget, if saturation is something you're looking to improve in your mixes, I cover that in detail inside my Step By Step Mixing System.

Here's what a recent student had to say:

"Provides a solid foundation to build from. Bear in mind though, that mixing is a creative process. There is no 'one size fits all' way of mixing. However this will give you a solid understanding of the fundamentals to get you going in the right direction. I would definitely recommend, especially if you are struggling to make sense of all the sometimes conflicting and confusing 'advice out there on the Internet."

If you're looking for something that takes the guesswork out of mixing and puts you on track to make professional mixes from your home studio, using only the five plug-ins you already have, here's where you go to get started:

www.StepByStepMixing.com