MADE IN AMERICA

Today I want to talk about the Made In America Festival that was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from September 1, 2012 through September 2, 2012. Jay-Z with the help of Budweiser, Duracell Powermat, and Translation, which is an advertising agency co-founded by Jay-Z and Steve Stoute, sponsored the festival. The Made In America Festival took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts. Live Nation promoted the festival.  The Made In America Festival crowded more than 45,000 fans over the weekend and generated an estimated gross ticket sales of $1.3 million per night. 

The Made In America Festival brought new artists like Rita Ora,.Jay-Z's new artist. The Made In America Festival assembled a diverse, multigenerational list of musical artists from different genres including hip-hop Odd Future, Drake, Run-DMC, Kanye West, Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, Miike Snow, Jay Electronica Meek Mill, Beyoncé, Jill Scott, Eve, Santigold, Pusha T, and Big Sean. Electronic artists like Afrojack, Passion Pit, Janelle Monáe, Calvin Harris, Skrillex. Rock artists like Pearl Jam, X, The Hives to Urban Latin Prynce Royce. The festival also had a Public Service Announcement by President Barrack Obama during the Jay-Z and Kanye West opening performance at the Made In America Festival. For any music lover this festival was a delightful weekend. Gathering all these artists and superstar to perform live at the Made In America Festival, and watch live it would be a great and unforgettable experience. I remember back in 2010 when Jay-Z and Eminem did the Home And Home Concert, one in Detroit and two in New York at the new Yankee’s Stadium. I still have the videos, I remember watching 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, B.O.B, D-12, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Beyoncé all for the first time. I was unbelievable, over 50,000 people it was a sold out event. 

I never imagine myself been able to see all my favorites artists performing lives at the same place, but one thing for sure was that gave me the inspiration to see myself working as producer for an event like that. Events like the The Made In America Festival and Home and Home Concert are complex events that need time and good management to be successful. Also needs a good leader that can orchestrate all the people that are working in the event and make them feel good about themselves and that their work is worthy.

HOW TO MIX VOCALS

When mixing vocalsis important to have good compression, and equalization in order to get a good quality sound form the vocals. You can use external hardware for compressing and equalizing the vocals, as well as plugins if you are using computer software. In my case I use computer software knows as protools to work my vocals, so I will be mixing using plugins. There is a variety of plugins that can be use to mix the vocals, I prefer to use Wave plugins.
The first thing you going to do when mixing vocals is to equalize the vocals. You first want to clean all the frequencies that are not necessary in the vocals. For this you are going to use a filter to clean those unnecessary frequencies. Depending on the vocal you are going to eliminate the frequencies. Normally you can eliminate frequencies below the 80 hertz that will give you a good filtering to start equalizing the vocals. Then you want to stand out the presence of the vocals. Usually the presences of the vocals are at the 2k through 5k hertz depending on the vocals. Once you got this done you can start compressing the vocals. When compressing vocals you want to give that power that the vocals are mixing. A compressor has a threshold, a ratio, and a gain. The threshold is the point the compressor is going to start compressing the vocal. After you set the  threshold the actual amount of gain reduction depends on the 'Ratio' setting. the ratio setting is expressed in the form 4:1 or similar, and the range of a typical Ratio control is variable from 1:1 (no gain reduction all) to infinity:1, which means that the output level is never allowed to rise above the Threshold setting. 

These are general recommendations to mix your vocals and a point of references. There is a variety of ways to do it and all depends on the way that you want to listen your vocals. The best way to find out is to work on vocals everyday using different settings to acknowledge the different kinds of settings and effects. I hope this have help you out to have a better understanding of mixing vocals.