What you are talking about is "song arrangement", and it comes not so much with practice, but with listening to music actively. Listen to your favorite track and carefully detail the structure and transitions of the song. Transitions that you speak of are part of song arrangement and are a mental discipline that should be wielded with great care.

As far as transitioning between leads on a track, that depends on the style of song that you are trying to accopmlish. Trance, for instance, is not a parade of leads and it is not always wise to split up melodies between leads without a break or so to introduce them. Of course, it also depends on the melody -- whether or not it is a motif, or a hypnotic gate, or a counter melody. It's up to your ears and your experience and know-how. There's no secret.

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...On college-driven hiatus...

Thanks!

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There are two secrets to success: 1. Never tell everything you know.

Lowering the volume of the bass isn't really a great idea (I guess it could help if done very subtly) but if it's clashing with your lead you could always eq or filter out the higher frequencies of the bass and/or lower frequencies of the lead.

So essentially you'll have two versions of the bass, one unfiltered for when it plays on it's own and the other filtered for when the lead is playing.

If this doesn't work then maybe the bass and lead just don't work together. Then you could look at changing the rhythm, notes or sounds of the parts.

When going from lead to lead, 9 times out of 10 it's better to go from simple to complex or vice-versa. So really this would be riff to lead or vice-versa. As long as the two complement each other and the moment and/or fill is right you should be fine.

But these are obviously rough ideas and like B_man said, best way to figure it out is just to listen to tunes (with a pen and paper taking notes preferably).

quote:

Is it customary to lower the level of the bassline so that the lead becomes more dominant? When I think about it, it seems like it would be pretty awkward to do this.

that would be awkward. should let compression take care of that, it will be more subtle and transparent.

if its really a problem, you probably need to highpass eq the lows out of the lead.

quote:

Even moreso, whats the best way to handle going from one lead to another?

i think your getting into the artistic side we cant answer for you.

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