Picture your mix like an empty canvas with an endless palette of creative options! Learn 4 ways to create artistic contrast using depth, width, colour and dynamics.
Understanding contrast in a mix is a valuable tool to help bring a more artistic perspective to an otherwise technical topic. Rather than imagining your mix as a mass of frequencies, decibels and inputs, picture it like an empty canvas or raw color palette.
Here we’ll look at 4 different ways to create artistic contrast in your mix, with concepts borrowed from the art theory realm.
1. Contrasting Depth in a Mix
Stationary visuals, like photography and painting, require the creator to find ways to mimic movement and space despite the 2D medium. You can recreate a similar perception of movement and depth in your mix as the photographer has done in the image below.
a. Focal Depth
Focal depth is where items in the foreground of the frame are shown in more detail than those in the background. Notice how the grass in the above image is far more detailed than the mountains despite the drastic difference in scale?
Both transient shapers and compressors with medium to slow attacks are ideal for accentuating the initial details in the sounds you wish to draw to the foreground. This allows for the snappy and detailed transients to pop out of the mix, which directs the listener’s focal point to the element you want to appear closer.
In the above image, the left-bank grass only appears close because of the less-focused elements in the background. With regard to a mix, that detailed, transient-heavy sound only appears near to the listener when contrasted against the less-detailed elements you’ve pushed further back in the mix.
This is why reverb works so well for depth, as the dusty qualities it introduces washes out the semblances of detail that would usually draw things forwards. But that’s not all. Fluid and gentle compressors, such as the SSL G-Master Bus Compressor whose attack is set to fast around .1 or .3 remove the sound’s details which, contrary to the slower-acting dynamic controllers above, pushes it further back in a mix.
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