being that vocals is the most imortant element of pop music, I usually after I comp my vocals I get them to sit just right in he rough mix. then I adjust all the other instruments to support and reinforce the vocals. I know that many people begin by getting the drum sound first, then bass etc and work that way but i always go for getting my vocal sound first and everything relegates to that.

so your saying that you don't bounce your vocals together you mixdown everything at once

what do you mean by 'bouncing your vocals together'? You mean like the lead vocal and back up harmonies, etc? I don't bounce them together at all, if that's the case. they remain in their separate tracks and get mixed down with everything else. What am saying, though, is that I get a rough mix of the instruments going, then work on the vocals and get them the way I want them. Then i go back and revisit the instruments and mix them to support/complement the vocaltracks, as opposed to a lot ofg other people who do drums, the bass, then other instruments and the vocals last. Anytime i work this way i find myself turning all the other tracks down as hey are too loud for my vocals, so I just rather work the other way.

Caisson wrote: this is should be an easy ? for you guru's.......is it better to mixdown or bounce vocals before you mixdown all of your tracks or is it better to just mixdown all at once?

I've found that it's easiest for me to bounce my background vocals before I mixdown, that way, I can more easily manipulate all the background vocals by using one fader, instead of two or three faders. I don't really have to bounce all the vocals to one track because I use a Fostex VF160 16 track machine, but sometimes on a song I'll end up using many tracks for different instruments and it's less confusing if all the vocals are on one track, aside from the lead vocal track of course.

I like to make 2 back up vocal tracks and pan them left and right, thus giving the center to the lead vocal. Sometimes they will be duplicates of each other and other times when there is a lot of voices (4 or more) I will split these and pan them L & R-