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I have a track thats 95% female vocal and hang drum and I'm struggling to make them sound full without competing. They seem to both shine in the 1-5k range. What are my options for making them full while still feeling spacious and uncrowded?
Similarly, the hang starts out on it's own. Is it normal practice to have the EQ suddenly switch (via automation) when the vocal comes in? Or should I aim for one EQ that covers the whole track?
Thx!
Panning the sounds left or right might help sometimes. Also reverb as Evhz wrote before is great fix for your problem. For your question to the EQ switching. That technique is called sidechaining and is used alot in electronic music. I use it sometimes to duck music or ambience when voiceover kicks in. If you set your attack and release times right, you wont hear any "breathing" effect which you dont want. There is slight difference between normal sidechaining and dynamic EQ. normal sidechaining ducks the volume down. Dynamic EQ ducks the band you set up so you might look more into dynamic EQing than sidechaining alone. Good luck
EDIT: Also you might look into resonant frequencies that are narrow and might overlap and create bigger resonance alltogether.
I assume you are using any daw or audio mixing suite which allows you to set each sound (hand-drum and voice) into a separated channel.
A good way to make the sounds do not compete is to Reverb them a little bit. In your case, you could move the hang drum "backwards" by using a more medium-large hall reverb.
For the voice, and just as a suggestion, you could maybe make it sound closer using early reflections reverb settings as a little room-like reverb.
In order to achieve a high quality reverb there are several plugins out there, I use many, but among them I like:
TrueVerb Reverb plugin from Waves
ValhallaRoom from Valhalla DSP
