I have a question which touches a base of composing in renoise. I suffer this problem for long long time, thinking how to solve it but nothing helped me till today. When im creating a track in renoise everything goes smooth but if I wanna add other track which should be played together with first one this problem happens almost all the time. It looks like those two tracks do not correspond with each other and often one track covers other one. Its making a feeling as there is no space for more than one track. I bring an example of this situation (check mp3 file). I was trying to solve it with stereo image setup which makes situation little a bit better but doesnt solve a problem completely. I bring a screen with stereo setup as well when You see that signal which covers bell sound is almost in mono. This screen shows a setup for mp3 example. I know that many of us think now about frequencies covering but believe me I experiment with it as well. It can be also a resault of hard drive of tracks (I often use a lot of saturation, overdrive). Could You tell me what is your experience with situation like this? Did you suffer described problem as well? Maybe its how renoise sounds? I will be glad for any comment.
To me it sounds like the timpanis just mask the bells, nothing more. This is ofc no special thing about renoise.
Both sounds just seem to occupy the same frequency ranges. Then the Timpani gets louder than the bells -> heavy masking. It also doesn’t really help that both sounds have so little high end, they seem to live in the midrange solely, being so dull reduces the number of bands where each could be undisturbed from the other & thus punch through even when both are played at the same time.
Also it is a matter of consonance, think of how classical composers manage unisono of an orchestra by letting all instruments play the same note in the same intonation - one single tone is percieved. The bell and drum are a bit similar in rhythm and attack characteristics (bang like), so they melt together even more.
I would suggest to you finding some tutorial on the act of mixing, with a good part on eqing for seperation and clarity. If you really want to combine these similar dark sounds in a way so they wouldn’t shadow each other, you would need to have each have its distinct peaks and notches in the frequency space that don’t overlap. This is of course an art of itself to use eqs this way, and doing it good so the result isn’t off taste.
Stereo seperation can also sometimes help a little to pull sound apart from each other, but things just need their space that YOU need to carve out, no daw on this world would make this automatically for you (unless you use special plugins for this).
