How to Mix the Vocals in a Rap Song

Video Transcript

"Alright, now we're going to talk about mixing the vocals. After you semi-mix the beat a little bit, what you want to do is mute all of that. Mute it, just don't have anything. I'm going to show you something like that. You have the beat in there. Take it all out. Just leave the vocals by itself. After you mute the vocals and add the vocals by itself, you probably want to put some compression on it. Don't put more than four. If you put more than four, it starts sounding funny, unless that's the sound that you want. Put about four on the amount of compression that you have. Attack time probably should just be at one or zero and release time probably about 100 on your compression. But compress the vocals, don't put too much, the threshold is going to be depending on how much, how loud your vocals is already. So, the threshold, you're just going to have to play with your threshold a little bit. But you want to put maybe four, between two and four, on the compression when you're compressing the vocals. But get some compression on your vocals, put a little re-verb on your vocals. It gives it a real good full sound. And then your vocals should be ready. And then once you have your vocal sounding with the re-verb and the compression that you want, you may want to add a little EQ on your vocals as well. Then, you add your beat. You got your vocals added in. Put your vocals in, then all the beat that you mixed, put that in there. And see how it all flows together. You got your melody in there. Got your vocals in there. You got your high hat. Got your kick, you got your snare; you got your bass line. So what you want to do after you get all that in there is start fooling around and see how everything sounds. If it sounds good, then you're ready to go on."