As music is about the interaction of rhythm and pitch, mixing music is about the interaction of volume and tone.

Each element is a benchmark for how another is heard. If everything is big, nothing is big. If everything is small, nothing is small. If everything is bassy, nothing is bassy. Without some contrast among your elements, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to get a coherent mix.

Imagine you’re mixing on a song and the vocal seems dull. You use an EQ to boost some upper mid-range on that vocal. It sounds good and you move on to the rest of the mix. Some time later, you decide the vocal is dull again and you go back to the EQ and boost a little more upper-mid. Now the vocal sounds thin and slightly distorted from all the energy you’ve adding in this saturated area of its range.

Subtractive EQ is a good practice that can help you avoid this “over-boosting” distortion. The downside is it’s not the most natural thought process and it generally doesn’t make itself apparent as the correct thing to do until it’s too late. In the real world, we’re far more likely boost what is missing – and cut what we don’t like – than to cut everything except what we like. You may find yourself with a vocal that sounds great when solo’d, but slightly dull when in the mix.

Something in the band mix is causing the vocal to lack enough contrast to cut through without having a ton of EQ. The apparent solution in this case would be to adjust the upper-mids of the band mix to get it out of the way of the vocal’s sparkle.

This is another place where having all of your band tracks routed to an aux input can be very beneficial. That being the case, you can put an EQ on the band’s aux track and cut a little out at 2-3kHz. A small adjustment to the band’s mix in that range is likely to give your vocal that little shimmer you were looking for. There are several things you can do to manipulate the contrast among the elements of your mix. This is just one simple example of pulling a little out of one element to allow another element some space to shine. Stay tuned for some other cool ways to make sure your tracks will work and play well together.