eskimo wrote:I've had good luck turning it down, and drying it out.
Effects kill separation, especially c**p like delay and verb.
-edit- flatten your eq too.. it's all too easy to +1 yourself into mush.
No. EQ is exactly what you use to get everything to sit nicely, but most EQ works best used subtractively, like JS said. Anyway, to get things sitting nicely try these things:
First of all work out your panning. Anything that's under 500Hz or so (bass and kick mostly) is best left panned to the centre so that they can have the power of both channels to drive them, anything else you can put wherever you want. If you've got a guitar with a lot of sound at 2k and an organ with a lot at 2k and you pan one all the way left and the other all the way right they won't get in each others way so much. Working out your panning before you adjust EQ and levels is a great way to do things, because if you get the levels and EQ right and then do your panning it'll throw things out a bit.
Next do a basic level balance between all instruments. You might find the bass and the kick are getting in each others way. Decide which one you want to have doing the really low stuff and which you want tighter sounding and then use EQ to put a little notch down in each for the other one to sit in. It doesn't have to be a lot, maybe 2-5dB, but it makes a big difference.
For example you might be doing a track with a big dubby bassline and a tight kick so you might use a low shelf EQ on the kick to drop everything below 125Hz, then cut a notch out of the bass at around 400Hz for the kick to sit in. Obviously the frequencies you use will depend on the sounds of the bass and the kick, but you get the idea.
You basically do this with every instrument until the mix is finished. Remember it's usually best to cut, not boost, but a little boost of 2-3dB probably won't hurt.
Remember to cut a little bit out of everything for your vocals to sit in so you can make them intelligible without having to make them really loud. Then again, you might not want to do that cause it's sometimes good to have the vocals fighting with guitars, depends on the style of music.
You can also use sidechained compression to get things to sit in nicely with each other, which also helps a track groove along. Maybe do some reading on that, it's a bit much for me to get into now.
It might help you understand mixing better if you get a track you've been working on and do a mix where every instrument gets its own frequency all to itself, filtering everything else out with high and low pass filters. You'd be surprised how good a mix like this can sound, even though everything sounds bad soloed.
Doing a few mixes like this a playing around with the frequencies will help you understand what sounds from each instrument fit into the different parts of the frequency spectrum, and it'll help you mixes heaps.
hah