Ideally, you take care of as many of those conflicts as you can in the composition of the song. Really good songs often don't have that much going on. It's a common thing for newbies to think that they have to have all this stuff going on, and not to consider how the parts fit together. You can have a fat guitar and a bass in the same song, as long as they aren't playing on top of each other. That's all about good composition, coming up with a song structure where instruments aren't fighting each other any more than necessary. When it's necessary, then you have to start EQ'ing things to fit (though a lot of that ideally should also fall to the performers, to adjust their tone to fit better as performed.)

The modern approach (in poppy stuff anyway) often seems to be a hundred tracks, each of them fractionally EQ'd and all layered over each other. But it doesn't have to be that way. The fewer parts there are, the fatter and juicier each of them can be, because there's more space available. And the better they are arranged to work around each other, even more so. And that kind of thing also creates movement and syncopation as well, which I think is almost always beneficial to a song.

And the sparser the composition, the more you can use ambience (reverb and delays and such) because there is space for them, and that gives your mix depth as well. That will keep the composition from sounding sparse, by filling in the gaps in a nice way. That used to be a fairly common approach, but these days it's done a lot less often seemingly.

It's definitely nothing to be embarrassed about though. If you watch lots of documentaries about artists and bands and the making of albums and such, as I do, now major artists will sometimes talk about going through all these types of issues. And a pretty common one is that failure to understand that everything can't be huge. There's only so much space and if you make one thing bigger, that makes the other things sound smaller. You have to decide what's important and what's secondary. Give the important stuff the space it wants and the secondary stuff loses.

davdud101


I just realized (as far as my vocals):
To start, I am, in all seriousess, using a SingStar USB mic. For the Xbox game SingStar, yes. But what i found out is that this cruddy mic REALLY represses highs... A LOT. I was listening to one of my older recordings (probably about 4 years old... I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time), and notcied that my old mic, while being one of those terrible desktop standing mics, picked up highs way better than this new one. Thank goodness this one is a tad bit better sounding overall, but I really need those highs if I want my vocals to stand out in a track.... :| The time to upgrade is upon me.

I'll try without reverb.

Thanks for that reply, Chuck- Really informative! I never really thought of that some parts dominate freq areas, but I guess that's what keeps a recording sounding really clean.

In your OP you said this:   Turning the music up not only makes the music too loud (to the point that important things are getting distorted), but forces me to turn up the vocals to the point that they're NOT drowned out (which, by the way, never works- they're always drowned out at this point, and the whole track is waaaay too loud, not to mention you can hear the background hiss from my cruddy equipment)!! 


I suspected you were using a USB mic but did not go into it in my initial reply.  Yeah... it would be a good idea to stop using it. Get a nice USB INTERFACE (which is way different from a USB mic) and use a "real mic" with it. Most condenser mics will do you a much better job with a good interface, and the background will be absolutely quite. Even the cheap condensers will amaze you with a good interface. 


that one upgrade will make a huge difference in the quality of the recordings you are making. 


all the rest that I said still applies. 

Lots of good advice for you here - mostly that there are no shortcuts - only way to learn this stuff is to do it, then do it again and again...eventually you will get better and will be horrified by earlier mixes you did that you once thought were good. I've only skip read the replies you have so far, but I think the first thing you need to do is get a proper soundcard (interface) and a better mic. There will be many opinions about which mic you should get, but a Shure SM58 is a good all rounder for not much money. I use mine all the time. Which interface you need will depend on your budget and how many inputs you need. Establish this and then ask the question of other users in the Gear Forum. If you jsut record Guitar and vocs the Cakewalk VS20 may be a good place to start.  When it comes to mixing, one of the things that I do is to mix the busiest section of the song (often the chorus) first. Once this sounds well balanced, I find a lot of the other work is done for you, rather than starting with a less busy section and having to keep finding space for all the other elements as the song builds. A useful check you can do re relative levels is just to use your master fader to fade the song out and listen for what instruments disappear first. Whichever thing is the focus of the track should be the last to fade out.

Watch the free videos here  http://therecordingrevolution.com/category/mixing/ and you will learn a thing or two. Some of it will probably go over your head at this stage, but generally he's not too technical and explains things well for us mere mortals.

Most of all enjoy the journey, no point in doing it if it's not fun.  There are always people in these forums that are prepared to help and I have found it to be the single most valuable resource of free advice - some very talented people here who you can learn a lot from just by reading what they say - I certainly have.