Painting A Song

As in any painting, the middle subjects need to be a little clearer than the background. This can be rendered by placing them lower in the mix than the items you want to be noticed the most. Examples of middle subjects could be the chorded parts of guitars, keyboards or strings, or even harmony vocals. If you are using a single-track approach, playing the background track to help you know where to place the chords and those oohs and aahs with give them the distance they need while they help wash out the previous work to soften those sounds. If you are multi-tracking, some composers will place a loose vocal track to help placement, too, or just let these instruments listen to other bandmates and/or the background track so they will know where to play or not.

FOREGROUND AND FINISHING

In any piece of art, the creator of the work will plan to direct the viewer to certain places and put items in clearer focus there or make them brighter colors to attract the needed attention. In music, this can be done by making parts louder, putting less "sauce" on them, writing them in a different octave than the rest of the instrumentation, or adding more treble to give the part a more abrasive edge. Have fun playing with these various approaches--each has a different set of plusses and minuses and this can vary along with the approach you took on the previous steps. In the single-track method, just placing items in the last layer or two will muddle underlying instrumentation enough to make the latter ones stand out better, but add too much echo, reverb or gain or other effects to the last track, and it can seem no clearer than the previously laid parts. This can be great if you are trying to keep, say, a guitar, string, harmony vocal or other instrument lower in the mix than the lead vocal, or if you are trying to slip in a naughty word past the censors. It can kill your song, though, if you are trying to pitch it and the judge can't discern the lyrics. On the other hand, if the vocal is too far out front in many rock songs a band may get passed over for sounding too "pop." Because of this, make sure vocal placement is where it should be for each use, or, better yet, make several

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