Sea level and its horizontal gradient are an expression of oceanic volume, heat content, and currents. Large-scale currents have historically been viewed as mostly “baroclinic’, and tides as “barotropic’, respectively, in the sense of being strongly related to the oceanic density distribution or not. The purpose of this note is to give dynamical precision to this distinction and, in the particular case of the tides, demonstrate the breadth of their combined barotropic-baroclinic interactions with a realistically forced, high-resolution simulation of the Pacific Ocean circulation. While the different tidal sea-level contributions manifest a horizontal scale separation (\eg more barotropic at larger scales; more baroclinic surface pressure-gradient force at smaller scales), there are cross-mode corrections in both at the level of tens of percent.