{Do D.A.T. collabo_pt. 3}

Hopefully by now you're pretty close to finishing up a beat for your remix of "Color Scheme". Today we're going to focus on mixing the vocals to sound as good as possible.

The areas I want you to focus on are:

• Balance the volume levels of the vocals and your beat
  
• Compressing the vocals
• Panning
• Using reverb with an Aux track.

Volume Balance
Since this is a song that has a strong vocal on it, you want to make sure that the main vocal really stands out so you can hear it. Listen closely to your beat and how loud it is relative to the vocal. If the beat is as loud or louder than the vocal, TURN IT DOWN a bit. Go to the Mix Window and pull down the fader of the Aux track that has Reason on it.

Also, the doubles tracks and adlibs should not be as loud as the main vocal. Try turning them down a bit so that they are supporting the main vocal, but not competing with it.

Compression
You should all be somewhat familiar with using a compressor and what it does to the sound of a vocal track. I want you to spend some time compressing Dat's vocals and getting them to sound nice and fat. In a professional recording, usually almost every vocal track has some compression. If you want to compress them all, go for it. At the very least I want you to compress the main vocals on the verse and the chorus:

• DAT v1.01
• DATchorus
• DATchrsl 1

If you forgot how to use a compressor, here is a link back to the Friday Night assignment where we learned how to compress.


Panning
Panning allows you to place certain instruments/tracks to the left or the right side of the stereo field. Doing this you can make your mixes richer and more interesting. Take a minute to listen to a bit of this track by Daedalus and hear how he's using panning. Pay attention to where the instruments are, from left to right:


If you go to your Mix Window, each channel has a section that looks like this:
To pan the track, just click and drag the slider to the left or the right. Generally, you want to keep the main vocal in the middle, and the backing tracks (doubles, adlibs, etc.) somewhere to the left or the right. For this song, one place to use panning would be on the chorus where Dat is repeating certain phrases ("black faces", "white cops", etc.).

I would also encourage you to pan some of the instruments in your beat. In Reason, you can adjust the panning with these knobs in the Mixer:

Reverb on an Aux track
The last thing I want you to do is to set up an Aux track with Reverb on it and see what it sounds like to send some of the vocals to it. To set this up, do the following:

1. Create a Stereo Aux Input track.
2. In the Inserts section of that track, create a D-Verb reverb processor (Multi-channel plugin>Reverb>D-Verb)
3. In the Inputs section of the Aux track, select Bus 1-2
4. In the Sends section of one of the vocal tracks, select Bus 1-2.
5. You should see a floating fader that pops up. Raise this fader to start sending the track to the reverb.