Growing up as a kid, being curious is a part of us. There are so many questions children have in their head just floating, that’s curiosity. When I was younger I wasn’t thinking about where I may be in a couple of years or college or anything of that nature. (When I got older, that’s when those types of questions came about.) I used to be more into sports before I started hanging out with my cousins who were into music at the time.

They would always talk about music in front of me, but I never really paid them any mind. One day I just dropped in on their conversation when they were talking about doing music, so I said, “Let me write something. Let me do a song with you guys. Now at that time I was just joking around and doing it just because it was fun and I was into it. Before I could blink my eyes, I was writing to instrumentals almost everyday. Now a couple of years, later my big curiosity now is mixing and engineering. I am so obsessed with trying to make my vocals sound perfect or at least somewhat nice. I just want to know how the professional engineers mix and master real artist vocals.

I wonder How do engineers pan vocals. With panning you can drag vocals to the far right, far left, the middle and center or add echoes when panning it lets you put your voice all the way to the left side of the speaker or right which ever you prefer.  Things that I see that keep me curious are YouTube videos, TV shows where people are in a real studio recording and I see vocals on the computer. My curiosity is audio engineering and music. Also wondering how do the professionals do it all. Before I got so caught up into quality and trying to get my sound right, I used to record with really bad quality but at that time to me and  my friends it sounded good; we were happy. How the audio came out was the last thing on our mind at that time; we just wanted to record and hear our words and beats and share it.

So about around 2010- 2011 I had my own microphone, computer and program. Even though I had those things, my quality was still a little bad, but after a while I started saying to myself “I have to fix this as soon as possible because no one will want to ride or listen to this for long.” So while I was in high school I met a few guys and one of them had this software program called “cool edit pro” and at first I was scared to ask him if he could put it on a flash drive for me, but when I asked he said yes with no problem. At that point I was beyond happy so after that I hunted that guy down every day until I got it in my hands because the day the guy said he would give it to me I didn’t end up getting it until a couple days later. When I received that program, I was happy because now I knew I had a program I could keep and also have to learn and figure out.

This was when I started to really get into mixing and clearing my vocals up because I had to and no one else would do it for me. I ended up pretty much just learning on my own on how to mix and master and clean my vocals up better. I also watched YouTube videos to help me out more on questions I had for myself and about the program. When I kept playing around with it, I learned a lot more. For my first vocal’s I used an amplify filter and put in center wave, dynamics processing, reverb, FFT filter, graphic Equalizer, and spit clear. I was switching up my steps as I was growing and doing more music and learning.

The microphone I had was really bad; I was using a computer microphone which I thought was great until I started to notice air was going through the microphone while I was recording. The air sound sounded like static almost, so I knew I couldn’t have that even though at first I didn’t notice it and did a few songs with it.Even when I did notice it I hated it, it started really getting to me but I couldn’t get another microphone any time soon. I took a break for a while before I started to record again because it was no point to me if I knew it would sound bad or not how I wanted it. A couple of months passed and one of my friends let me borrow his microphone until he came back, but he never said when he would come back. He just told me “I know where it’s at and I’ll be back you good.” I was like that’s cool. It turns out the microphone ended up staying there for a couple of months so at that time I was back to recording and I had learned new ways to clear my vocals up and new steps. Now around this time I was happy with my vocals and have done numerous songs and other artist’s songs but every once in a while I would listen to songs on the radio and hear people’s vocals and quality in a car and try to compare my sound with theirs. That’s probably why I kept getting frustrated and more curious. I just kept speculating on how the real engineers mix and master vocals and what are the right things to do, even though there isn’t  one set way to do it and others mix it in different ways, I would just like to know the basics.

My curiosity came from doing it all the time and just wondering to myself if I could learn more, how can I learn more, can I go to school for this,  a whole lot of things. At the end of the day I’m so curious about mix and mastering and what I have been doing right and wrong also how I can improve.