4 general vocal mixing tips for beginners (rap vocals)

In this post I want to give you 4 quick mixing which resulted out of my personal experience in the 8 years I try to mix my vocals by myself.

Less is more

I often listen to songs where more than two main vocal tracks are placed upon each other. Some people say that this would be good for beginners to compare their low mic quality and give your voice more power. But in my opinion the vocals often don't sound that clean with this technique. Especially if they are not 99% synchronised to each other, what is very hard to realise.
Instead of laying one on top of the other vocals tracks you should improve the quality of the the vocals in general.
Copying the one vocal track and pan one of them a bit in the left stereo field and one in the right, also works good for me – depending on the beat that is used. Sometimes you need to play around a bit, for example try 50% L and 50%R. If the vocals sound too wide you need to pan them more into the middle. Please keep in mind that the main volume of the vocals will increase when you pan the two tracks closer to each other.

More cutting than pushing

One very important thing is the way you use the Equalizer. Some people still think it is better to push some frequencies and increase them by equalizing. But in fact, this is wrong. It is very important that you cut some of these frequencies away. Especially the lower frequencies for Rap vocals.
Of course it is depending on your microphone. And some frequencies need to get pushed anyways. Important is that you try around a little bit – every voice is individual and also the way it is recorded. So try and save different presets for your EQ and compare them to get the best results.
Here is an example: This is how I set my equalizer for rap vocals:

Listen to it on many different devices

One of the most important things is listening to your mixdown on many different devices. Sometimes (especially with a low budget equipment) it is hard to find the „golden mean“. You need to produce a mixdown that is sounds good on many different devices. For example: One day I exported my mixdown and listened to it on my PC with good speakers. It sounded awesome. Afterwards, I listened to the song on my smartphone (with headphones) and it sounded very bad. But on the car radio it sounded awesome anyways. So I needed to do a mix that sounded good on EVERY device, what is a little bit difficult sometimes. But you want to make your music enjoyable on any device, so try around here too to get the best results!

Give your ears a break

I can say, that it is very very important to give your eyes a break after hours of mixing. At some point, your ears are just overstrained and needs to „relax“ for a few hours. If you don't do that, you won't be able to analyze your mix neutrally. You won't hear the differences when you do the fine tuning. And as we know: the fine tuning can convert your „home made mix“ into a professional-sounding song. So give your ears a break – listen to singing birds in the garden and just let them relax :)

Thanks for reading my article! If you liked it, feel free to share it to all of your (rapper) friends :P