Dear Everyone.

I write instrumental music - or try to - it's usually gentle, New Agey stuff. So I start off with an oboe - for example - as my lead sound, mix the strings/everything else perfectly to fit the oboe. Then for the second half of the track I want a flute to be the lead sound for a bit of variety.

What I always find is the sounds that were perfectly (HAH - we're talking theoretically here!) EQ'd etc. to go with the oboe now sound totally awful with the flute. If I adjust everything to sound fine with the flute, of course they'll sound awful with the oboe.

Which means I'm ending up with (at least!) two complete sets of backing sounds, one for each lead instrument. Or if I change lead instruments 3 times - even for just a couple of bars - I'm having to have THREE completely differently EQ'd and effected sets of backing sounds, one for each 'lead instrument'.

Now I'm not the world's greatest at doing backing mixing, but if I fight through the pain barrier to get the backing sounds sounding OK with ONE instrument, is there any way I can keep the same backing sounds mix setup for both leads (ignore the third, let's stick to 2) or does there always have to be a completely differently setup set of backing sounds for each lead sound?

I'm using solely VSTs (and plugins/soundfonts maybe, mainly VSTs.)

Yours hopefully

Chris.