| It all depends on the material but I often find myself cutting for clarity. For example when you have a thick arrangement with a lot of midrange information I often will scoop some of the midrange out of a few tracks to make more room for the vocals.
It's weird. Listen to a thich full sounding string pad solo. It sounds great. Now add some stereo backing vocals and the lead vocal and the strings could begin to mask the vocals, making you push them up, then push the string up etc., which is a never ending cycle.
Now scoop the mids out of the strings and everything comes back into focus. But... when you solo the strings they don't sound as thick and rich anymore. No problem. They won't be solo'ed in the song. As long as they sound good in context.
One trick that engineers do on piano intros is to have a full bodied piano on the intro and then when the other instruments come in thin it out by scooping our rolling of some of it.
It's all about context.
Lawrence |