Roles and Frequency Space
You have eight tracks and it sounds like one grey soup. Turn up the vocal and the guitar disappears; turn up the guitar and the vocal goes. That is masking, and it is a property of hearing rather than a fault in your mix.
- masking
- upward spread
- one role per range
Where you run into this
- Mixing
- Arranging
- Production
- Live sound
In short
Masking means that the presence of one sound makes another harder or impossible to hear: the threshold for sound A is lifted by the presence of sound B. It happens in the ear, before any decision you make, which is why no fader move solves it.
Once you hear a sound disappear rather than fade, mixing stops being about volume and starts being about space.
How it works
The detail that actually drives arranging: masking is not symmetrical. A low sound masks higher sounds far more effectively than a high sound masks lower ones. That upward spread is why a thick low-mid part damages everything above it, and why clearing space low often fixes a problem that seemed to be high.
Where you run into this
- A vocal that vanishes when the guitars enter, with nothing getting louder
- A bass and a kick that are individually fine and together are mud
- A mix that clears up when one part is moved an octave
In practice
Fix it at the source. Move a part to a different register, change its voicing, or take it out of the section entirely. Every one of those solves the problem the equaliser can only disguise.
Keep going
Everything in production and arranging
- Arrangement and Energy
- Arranging for a Band
- Roles and Frequency Space
- Orchestration Basics
- Writing for Strings and Winds