Dubstepforum.com

I always have a tough time adding a synth melody over midrange bass and making it distinctive from one another. meaning its kinda muddy and they both arent clea. What should i be eq'ing or highpassing my synth at over a standard midrange heavy bassline. also should i be panning or doing anything else beside eq'ing/highpass.any insight welcome. Thanks.

Reductive EQ on whatever is loudest
Have you tried moving the melody up an octave? Or playing more than one octave? This works sometimes

Apologies for any incorrect music terminology, I don't know much about chords/keys/scales etc

Subtractive eq as stated above. Or try panning the melody to one side.

You can try doing a mid side EQ if you wanna keep the bass really wide

perhaps try using sounds for the melody that are higher in register than your mids.

try boosting, or probably taking out certain frequencies of each, so if they are both using the same area of frequency, like around 1k lets say, then try taking out like around 500 - 1k on the melody, and then take out like 1-2k of the mid freqs, not take out all thought, just lower slightly, then maybe boost the opposite of both a tiny bit, this should then hopefully help separate them in the mix, and stop them clashing and muddying up.

I think your problem has more to do with composition than with production. Focus on what's most important: the melody or the bassline. If you want the melody to be the most important element of your track, I would compose/design the melody first and then make the bassline fit the melody. If you want the bassline to be the most important, vice versa. It's all about making choices, if you do that wise you don't need to eq that much, except for a bit of low cut here and there. It should just fit naturally

I do think it's harder to make a melody fit a bassline than the other way round, though. A big bassline takes up a lot of room in your mix and limits your options to make a nice melody, while most of the time there's still room for a bassline that can make your track sound bangin', if you compose and design it well to fit your melody

Transients can be your friend in a case like this to help cut through the mix. For instance if you give a nice sharp and quick stab on the attack of your synth it can really cut through the mix in a sharp way with out taking too much space in the whole arrangement. You can do this in a variety of ways but I find that FM synths help me work with transients the easiest since even the most basic ones allow envelopes over the harmonics that are being added. Not only is this a sharp way to make your synths fit into the mix but it also opens up a lot of creative opportunities, so these are great tools to know.

If this and the subtractive EQ as other people have mentioned are not enough than you may need to consider changing your arrangement so that there just isn't as much clutter in those troublesome frequencies.

Have you tried making your mid-range grinder synth patch play the melody?

The two sounds have gotta be different enough. Chances are your synth line sounds too much like your bass line. Scoop out the low frequnces of the synth.