Well utilizing stereo separation can also help you out. Maybe panning your lead a little to one side. Check out the tutorials in huge tutorial section. Those have seemed to really help me out. Eqing is one of the hardest concepts to grasp and pull off well so it'll take some time.

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Propper voicing helps aswell...

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quote:

Originally posted by ezra Hey guys. Having a bit of trouble with equing my trance saws and pads. In your uplifting trance tracks the norm would be to have a ‘meaty’ saw lead opening up it’s filters while being supported by some kind of harmony – usually in trance these tend to be wide stereo pads/strings. What I’d like to know is how do most tracks pull it off without either of the two elements drowning each other out: the lead or the pads, as I’d presume that this being trance, both would have plentiful amounts of reverb applied and to me both seem to be fall under similar timbral characteristics: the lead usually thick analog-sounding occupying frequencies along the whole spectrum and the same for string /pad sections-chords also taking up a lot of the spectrum. Any guidelines as to where one could start with regards to typical eq settings or may this also have something to do with mix compression. A typical scenario: the track ‘drifting away’ by lange seems to pull this off well.

Supersaw leads tend to have a whole lot of high end, where as pads cover the mid-low ends. This way they will provide harmony without drowning each other out.

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One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.
- Robert Moog

Its all about mixing, try to make the two melodies sit together within the mid to high ranges using good Eq'ing. I tend to remove nearly all the low end from any lead riff. As someone suggested earlier, panning each sound in an opposite direction slightly can help too.

I wouldnt put lots of reverb on either melody as this will carry unwanted frequencies across the riff and you will get a mash up of sounds over the key changes. The same goes for delay. Add just a touch of delay and reverb to add some colour to the sound.

If you want the sound to really stab out, create slightly shorter notes in the riff by either physically shortening the note size in the riff sequence window or use the ADSR envelope(s) to model the sound on the synth or sampler. Then add a touch of compression to the riff.

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