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How to Mix Vocals With Mastered Beats

More and more amateur and professional vocal artists record their songs in their home studios. Mixing your vocals with prerecorded, already mastered, beats saves time and money. You do not have to make arrangements for your musician friends to appear in your home studio at the same time. This also means you do not have to invest in extra studio equipment. In addition, many sites offer music tracks for free downloading with very generous licensing agreements. Your computer does not come with preinstalled sound-editing software, but you can find a variety of free, open-source, audio editing suites on the Internet.

Things You'll Need

Microphone
Headphones
Sound editing software

Instructions

- 1
  Select your beats from your Internet sources. Download them to your computer.
- 2
  Load them into your sound editing software. Your software displays your beats visually as audio tracks, allowing you to cut, paste and move them back and forth as you desire.
- 3
  Arrange the tracks until you are satisfied with the result. Merge the tracks into a single audio track, according to your software's specifications.
- 4
  Adjust your audio editing software's settings so that it will allow you to overdub, or record on top of, your existing tracks and allow for real-time play-through while you record your vocal track so you can hear the music while you are singing.
- 5
  Connect the headphones and microphone to your computer. Test your headphones by playing an audio track. Test the microphone with a quick mike-check recording. You can delete the test track as soon as you are satisfied with the result.
- 6
  Click your sound-editing software's "Record" icon. Record your vocal track. Click the "Stop" icon when you are done.
- 7
  Adjust the sound levels of both tracks and any other settings until you are satisfied. Add special sound effects, such as echo, reverb or phasing, as you desire. Merge the vocal and music tracks into a single track. Export your song into the sound format of your choice.

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