Mixing with accapellas Vol1, House music

0:00 First of all, what is an acapella?

Right folks, in this video what we're going to be talking about is acapellas and how to mix acapellas. First of all, what is an acapella? Because believe me, like everything there's a lot of people out there who haven't got the foggiest. Right, now then, of course you've all heard a song, we've all heard all kinds of songs, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, it doesn't matter. Turn the radio on, you hear music, okay? Now then, when you hear a particular song, you'll hear melody, bassline, beat. All that sort of stuff, but also you hear vocals. Now then, let's say all of a sudden everything was taken away and you were just left with the vocals. Everything else gone, the beat, the melody, the bassline, just the vocals. Now then, that is an acapella. In other words, what I'm saying is if you had a record and you took everything away but you left the vocals...

1:49 From this album, from Bob Sinclair, I'll put all the information down

On that record, you'd end up with what is known, the terminology as an acapella. Now then also you can have hip-hop songs and what you will find quite often on a 12 inch hip-hop song or on a CD single, you'll have the original version, you'll have the LP version, you'll have the radio version, quite often the radio version is edited, all the swearing etc. is edited out of that so it's meant for radio. Then you have the uncut version which is of course, it's got the ifs and buts in it. From this album, from Bob Sinclair, I'll put all the information down. We're going to be mixing it as track entire of Freedom. Now then, how do we find the beat in this particular song? If you listen. Now this is what I do, okay? By all means, comment if you do it a different way. I'm listening. Now then, this is practice.

Some people find this easy, some people find this difficult. But again, it's all about using your ears, listening, relaxing and practicing. That's what it's all about. Don't expect to be able to just chuck this on and go for it, okay? And get it first time. I mean, I've made some cock-ups and I still do to this day and I probably always will. In fact, if I don't make any more cock-ups ever again, then I'll get worried. Alright, now here we go. What we'll do, we'll put this particular song on. Well, actually what I'll do first, I'll play you this cut here, the Freedom track from Bob Sinclair. Just play a little bit of it and you can get the general idea. But then what I'm going to do is I'm going to add the acapella. It lifts it that little bit higher. This is the good bit, okay? Right, here we go. Just move it on a little bit, alright? Now again, when mixing in acapellas, especially vocal type acapellas, always make sure, very important, the key change, okay? You need to try and keep the keys matched, otherwise it will still sound very dodgy.

3:55 This is the song without the acapella

And then also another important factor, and that is if there is vocals already on the song that you want to mix the acapella into, then that's fine. But just try and make sure they don't really clash because that doesn't sound very good either. Alright, this is the song without the acapella. Now what we'll do, we'll bung the acapella in. If you do something like this, if you've got a third turntable, then you can start mixing in the next tune and keep the acapella in there as well. Hope that's been a help. We'll do more on these, but practice and enjoy. Nice one.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.