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Beat Making – How To Synchronize Vocals

Beat Making – How To Synchronize Vocals

This is an essential technique especial if you’re doing a remix track for a popular song or just trying to explore new ways to work vocal sections and add them in parts of your beats.

Synching vocals is not a hard thing to do and you can actually implement this technique in every DAW there is out there so if you’re patient enough to spare a few minutes we’d be happy to break everything down for you. We will focus specifically on fitting the acapellas into an existing tempo so let’s see how it goes.

First off, you need to begin by questioning the BPM of your acapella file and the BPM of your beat so you can synch them. Assuming that you have an acapella that doesn’t fit your beat (typical remix situation), how do you make them both go together and craft a new song? The answer to that question is actually simple: time stretching. You take the acapella file and you stretch it until it fits your beat but that’s not always the case because there are situations where you need to shrink your file because it’s going down way too slow.

Import, listen to the acapella file and find a starting point to begin work with. A very constructive technique here would be to cut everything that’s in front of the chorus and focus on this part to begin with but if you’re feeling brave you can work on a verse as well even if it could be hard to handle. Now, pass on to time stretching your vocal sample and focus on making an 8 bar loop that you can play over and over again. The reason this needs to happen is because you need the find the right tempo of the vocal sample and synch it with the rest of your beat. Your DAW should have a MUL knob (time stretch multiplicateor) that you can play around with and this is actually how you’ll be able to find just the right tempo for both parts to be synchronized just right.

After you managed to do so, expand the full length acapella and that’s it, you have enough material to do a brand new remix and start a new career as a DJ. Well that’s not quite it but this technique should bring you enough material to create a few new beats so get to work!

Alex Moruz Alex is a keen music aficionado who has written and published acclaimed opinion pieces on modern music genres such as techno, hip hop, rap and new age. He is a musician by training and has co-produced several records.