It is very important that your room that your mixing in has proper Acoustics. What does that mean? NO Standing waves, if your still confused here is the skinny on this term. In a square room where you have parallel walls on each end. When you have walls running parallel you create this effect in the room called stand still waves. Sound waves travel but but can easily get trapped in certain parts of the room and give you a totally different sound then what you hear. So the bass that you thought was hitting hard is actually very weak, and your over all mix just don't sound mixed.

This is due to improper room acoustics, you have prepare your room for mixing and you do it with Diffusers. Sound diffusers are designed to scatter or disperse sound waves, thereby reducing standing waves and echoes and creating a better listening environment.

I encourge everybody with there own setup to try and give your room the right acoustics and compare your old mixes to the new. here are a few links to sites that have diffusers information and sales

http://www.acousticalsolutions.com/education/index.asp

I haven't tried this but it also serves the same purpose to give you proper room acoustics, its called the ARC system

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/arc/

If your cheap you really shouldn't be in the music game b/c nothing to make your acoustics is cost effective. Not that your going to spend thousands but it will be a investment.

Dr. Dre is not stupid, i guess he knows with this Iphone craze everybody is going towards headphones as there prime way of hearing music. Of course Dr. Dre didn't just get into regular headphones he is doing a Noise Cancelling "studio" headphones.

"At $349, these are priced at exactly the same point as the Bose QuietComfort 3, these headphones closest competitor. I’ve been wearing them for the past hour and found them on par with the QC3s in terms of noise reduction. They have very crisp bass and a nice separation as well.

CrunchGear".

The market is already saturated with some really neat headphones so he will have to really use his name to get them out there. one thing that does set these apart is that it uses standard AAA batteries instead of its own rechargeable pack so in case you didn't recharge it at night you can just buy some cheap ones.

I still wouldn't Just rely on headphones for your final mixes. Headphones do a bad job at telling you if the audio is distorted.

 

 

 

One of the first things you should keep in mind when making a mixtape is that all the music you get should be a good copy of the song and not a Low Bit rate mp3 file. There is nothing worse to a audio engineer then a poor sounding mp3 beat. If Your going to mix your vocals with a bad sounding mix then all your going to get is a bad sounding mix.

If this is your first mixtape i would not suggest going out and getting a piece of equipment till you first have some experience in how a mixtape is lade out and go thru the process of making a mixtape. I might be a lot cheaper for you to have someone record it and mix it for you the first time or the second time making  mixtape.

 If you decide that you want to go ahead and get the equipment you need to do a mixtape i would suggest starting small and working your way up. There is about 100 apps out there that can do what the other does so its not one audio program that you must start on to get what you need. If computer is not the way you want to go there are a lot of studios in a box that will work just the same. And i would not get anything smaller then a 8 track recorder. Digital or analog.

 Recording your vocals is going to be the most challenging but should be easy with the right setup. You don't want to spend a lot of money on your first go around on recording. A Shure sm58 will cost you 60 bucks and it sounds great. You never want a lot of distortion so watch your levels remember with audio we can always get louder but if your too loud going in you lose the dynamics of the vocal and you start sound muffled.

As far as mixing a mixtape i always follow this rule, your vocals is  the focal point of the music don't have your beats too loud then you can't hear your vocals. Let your vocals sit just a bit over the track and you don't have the music as loud as it can go you can come down on the track and have your vocals be just over the track.

Im not getting into great detail because it would take a hell of a lot more pages of info to really breakdown how to record a mixtape but that is why i suggest getting a pro for the job the first or second attempt at Recording. i will be adding Tips and tricks as time goes along so i hope this is a good start.