How to Mix Hip Hop: Every Decision on a Real Song, Start to Finish

Most hip hop mixing guides give you a list of tips. This one follows a single real song, “Glad I Spent It” by WhooKilledKenny, from the rough the artist sent me to the finished mix, and explains every decision along the way.

The rough had a lot going for it. It also had a limiter crushing the kick, snare and 808 so hard that the punch was gone. By the end, the drums hit again, the 808 translates to small speakers, and the vocal is bright without getting harsh.

Here’s the full video if you’d rather watch it:

Start by listening to the artist’s rough mix

Before I touch a plugin, I listen to the rough and write down two lists: what the artist clearly likes, and what’s holding the song back.

What Kenny liked:

• Bright vocals. That was obviously on purpose, so the mix keeps them bright.
• A delay on the vocal. He’d put one in the rough, so I planned to keep something like it.
• Auto-Tune. He had it on the vocal in the rough, so I kept it.

What was holding it back:

• The limiter. The kick, clap and 808 were all slamming into it, and the dynamics and punch went with them.
• The vocal was bright but grainy, a little muffled at the same time. The goal was to keep the brightness and make it sound cleaner and more expensive.

This matters more than any plugin choice. The artist’s rough tells you what they’re hearing in their head. Your job is to get them there, not to replace their taste with yours.

One thing I noticed as soon as I pulled up the unlimited multitracks: some of the low end came back on its own, before I’d done anything. That’s how much the rough’s limiter was costing.

Get organized first: folders and buses

Every session starts the same way. I color code the tracks and put them into five folders:

1. Drums: basically kick and snare. On this song the clap plays the snare’s role.
2. High percussion: cymbals, crashes, hats. A snare fill can go here or in drums, depending on how it sounds.
3. Bass: here, the 808.
4. Music: mostly one chord sample, plus some DJ cuts in the chorus.
5. Vocals: verse, chorus, ad-libs and a spoken word section.

Each folder feeds its own bus (all drums, all bass, all music, all vocals), and those buses feed the main fader where the mix bus and mastering chain live.

That looks redundant, but it earns its place three ways:

• I can turn the whole drum group up or down in one move.
• I can route the 808 into the drum bus and clip them together (more on that below).
• Printing stems is instant. Mute the instrument buses and you have an acapella. Mute the vocal bus and you have an instrumental.

I’m in Studio One here, but this works in any DAW. I did it the same way in Pro Tools for years.

Drums: Orion on the drum bus

I always start with drums, with everything else muted.

I use Orion on my drum bus about 90% of the time. Here’s my full breakdown of Orion. My starting point has the output turned down 5 dB, because with everything engaged Orion gets about 5 dB louder, and louder always sounds better. Turning it down means I’m judging the processing, not the volume.

Right away the drums sounded better. The kick still needed more tap on top, so I put a second Orion on the kick channel only, with everything turned off except the Grit section, before it hits the bus. If I’d added Grit on the bus, the clap would get it too, and the clap didn’t need more transient. If anything, the clap was going to need to be a bit less bright later so it wouldn’t fight the vocal.

The 808: make it translate, then get it out of the kick’s way

Two jobs on the 808.

First, harmonics. A clean 808 disappears on phone speakers and laptops, because they can’t reproduce the fundamental. I added a little bass enhancement, then the HG-2, one of my favorites. Together they made the 808 rounder and gave it upper harmonics, so you still hear it on small speakers.

Second, ducking. I set it up so the kick ducks the 808 every time it hits. You barely notice it on its own. You notice it at the end, when you’re trying to get the master loud, because low end is the killer of a loud master. When the kick and 808 aren’t stacking on top of each other, there’s more room for level.

The kick and 808 relationship decides the whole mix

If the kick and 808 aren’t working together, the whole mix is a mess, no matter how good the vocal sounds. So once the music was in, I came back to it.

I sent the 808 into the drum bus so the kick, clap and 808 all process together, and put Orange Clipper on that bus. Orange Clipper is basically a recreation of the FL Studio clipper. I compared the two here.

Two reasons for it:

1. I couldn’t tell whether the rough was made in FL Studio, but something in it was definitely clipping. A little of that “FL sound” is right for a lot of hip hop records.
2. Clipping the drums and 808 together glues them and shaves the peaks, which makes the final master much easier to push.

After that I spent a few minutes moving frequencies around between the kick and the 808 until they sat together.

Music and percussion: stay out of the vocal’s way

With the drums and 808 working, everything else gets mixed with one question in mind: will this fight the vocal?

• Clap: it felt dry and a little lifeless. Not a brightness problem, a space problem. I put a Valhalla Plate on it with the mix set at just 6. Tiny, but with it bypassed the clap sounds flat.
• Chord sample: I used the spectral mode on FabFilter Pro-Q to pull a few frequencies out. The sample already had a lot of lo-fi saturation, so it wasn’t going to crowd the vocal much.
• DJ cuts: I wanted them clearer and more exciting, so I used the drive section on Softube Console 1, drive at 0.4 with the character set bright.
• Hi-hat: it sat dead center, right where the vocal lives. I used MAutoPanMB, one of my favorite panners because it has a dry/wet blend, to widen it so the hat “dances” more, and pulled out some 6k, which was already hurting my ears before the vocal was even in.
• Crash: too loud, so I turned it down, then gave it some Valhalla VintageVerb so it fades out longer instead of just stopping.

How to mix rap vocals: bright without harsh

This is where the artist’s rough really guided things. He wanted bright vocals, so the whole chain is built around brightness that doesn’t get harsh.

I solo the vocal at first. I’m not normally a fan of soloing, but for vocals it’s how I’ve worked for years.

Here’s the chain, in order:

1. Cut low end first. Instead of boosting the top to get brightness, I cut a lot of the low end. It gets you to bright from the other direction, and it often sounds cleaner.
2. Auto-Tune, because the artist had it on his rough. Basic settings: key of the song, slight retune speed. Nothing crazy.
3. 1176. My favorite vocal compressor, set to my default. If the vocal needs to sit back into the beat more, I adjust the release.
4. DynAssist for de-essing. I skip the ride, vocal gate and breath sections and only use sibilance. It cuts only where the S’s are, and to me it does a better job than most standard de-essers.
5. FabFilter Pro-MB in four bands, mainly controlling the low mids and upper mids so the vocal stays steady.
6. VT-5 EQ to put the brightness back. It has amazing top end.
7. Fresh Air, a little.
8. Waves CLA Vocals to top it off, with a little slap, stereo at zero, and the parallel pulled back.

One trick worth stealing: turn the hi-hats off while you set the vocal’s top end. I want the vocal to own the top of the mix, with the hats secondary. If the hats are playing, it’s easy to under-brighten the vocal because the hats are filling in the highs for it.

Effects: a rap vocal should live in a space, not swim in it

This is a rap record, so the vocal doesn’t need to be very wet. But fully dry sounds like it’s pasted on top of the beat.

I blend several effects, pushing each one up and pulling it back until it sits:

• A little room reverb
• A little plate reverb
• A micro pitch effect
• An eighth note delay
• A second, different room

Blending a few reverbs gives a dimension you don’t get from any one of them alone. This is the reverb and delay chain I use on most mixes.

The eighth delay is louder than I’d normally run it. That’s on purpose: Kenny had it in his rough and clearly likes it, so it stays.

With the effects in, a few spots got too crispy. I put Soothe on the vocal with a filter preset I built that tames the top end only where it gets harsh.

Then I A/B’d the vocal against the rough to make sure it was at least as bright as what the artist was used to.

The master: clip before you limit

I put the God Particle on the main output at the very start of every mix, so I’m always hearing the mix through it. On this song its limiter is barely working, just catching small overs.

To match the rough’s loudness, I added two more stages:

1. Sima, a clipper, before the final limiter. It’s a fine line with this one before it starts distorting. I set its low shelf bias down so the low end passes through the clipper with less clipping, which keeps the 808 from getting mangled.
2. UNI-L as the final limiter, where I usually start on the full or loud setting.

Before any A/B, match the loudness of your mix to the rough. Otherwise whichever one is louder wins, and you learn nothing.

The last push: parallel compression on the vocal

At matched loudness the mix was already beating the rough. The kick and 808 had more thump and push, and the vocal stood up. But I wanted the vocal a little more forward.

So I added a CLA-76 in parallel right before Soothe, slammed it with a super fast release and a medium attack, and blended it in at 20%. The vocal pushes forward, but it keeps the dynamics the mix already had.

Ad-libs

For the ad-libs, I copied the main vocal chain over, then gave them their own flavor: more quarter note delay, more reverb, and a shelf filtering them down so they sit behind the lead.

(Being able to drag a whole chain across like this is one of the main reasons I moved from Pro Tools to Studio One.)

What I’d do with another hour

For the video I stopped here. On a real session I’d spend roughly another hour on:

• Pushing the mix a bit further
• Tweaking the master chain
• Reverb and delay throws on the right words to add some spice

Want your hip hop song mixed like this?

Every decision in this post is what happens to your song when you send it to me: I listen to your rough first, keep what you love about it, and fix what’s holding it back. I handle every song personally.

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