I’m not sure what to title this video in order to find
the people that want the answers to the thing
that I’m making the video on without
accidentally drawing in the wrong people
and confusing them... while using the words, so...
-I’ll just-- -[loud, thumping music]
I’m trying to fix this. This thing here.
You see how you can’t really hear me that well
because the music-- when you try to put voices over music?
That’s... that’s what we’re trying to fix.
If that’s-- if you got here by clicking on a title
that wasn’t the right title, well, we’ll just call it
an April Fool’s joke, I guess, ‘cause...
that’s popular on YouTube, right? April Fools jokes?
[music stops]
...Look, I’ll just show you how to fix it.
Let’s get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He’s crazy ♪
What is happening, everybody? I’m Gerald Undone,
and today I’m gonna show you how to get your vocals
to pop over top of your background music,
where you can still get a good sense
of the background music to allow you to kind of, like,
bring it in and out through your B-roll,
through your cutaways, and also make your vocals still
sound nice and clear and not interfere with each other.
Get a good marriage going between those two.
So you only really need three things to do this.
The first one, obviously, is footage or audio
of you speaking. The second one is a music track that you like,
so I’ve got one here that I found called “Voyage.”
[bright electronic music]
♪
And then an editor, like Premiere Pro.
All right, so we got a clip here of some donkey talking
about things on the internet. Using a static image.
Now, you can do this with pretty much anything, you could--
All right, sounds good. There’s no effects or processing
done to the audio right now. And then let’s pull in
our music. We’re gonna do this really roughly.
So this is a part here where the music is quite loud,
and we’ll just play those two things together,
and we’ll see how it gets drowned out.
I’m gonna put my headphones on for this so that I can get
a better sense of what I’m talking about.
[loud electronic music]
[barely audible] ...write something like this...
So that’s completely indiscernible,
and that’s obviously what we’re trying to avoid.
Now, the natural inclination here would be to just lower
the volume of the background track, which works.
If we right-click on it and choose “Audio Gain,”
we can “Normalize Max Peak” to, like...
I don’t know -15 dB, let’s say.
And then we’ll set the audio gain
of our talking part to, say, -5 dB.
And then if we play those two things together,
-let’s have a listen to that: -[electronic music]
[same volume] OK, method one, the easy method: using
a static image. Now, you can do this with pretty much
-anything. You could just-- -So there’s a lot more
separation, but the real issue here is, do you see
how some of the frequencies from the music and some of
the frequencies from my voice are kind of overlapping?
And so you lose that “pop” that we were talking about.
There’s kind of a mid-ground that’s just
been muddied up pretty badly. So what we’re gonna do
to fix this is we’re going to use an equalizer.
Specifically, in Premiere Pro, we’re gonna use
the one called the “Simple Parametric Equalizer.”
Just type that into your search bar here, and you’ll see
“Simple Parametric EQ” under “Audio Effects.”
Drag that and put it on the clip for the music,
and then you’ll see that you have a few options here.
You have the center point, which is
the point that the dip will occur.
The “Q” width, which is sort of how widespread the dip will be.
Remember how we talked about this in one of my previous
audio videos? I’ll put a link in the description,
or in the comments, or both if you want to follow up on that.
But, basically, we talked about the parametric equalizer,
where we could lower different frequencies to sort of
improve our sound, and we wanted to, you know,
cut certain sounds narrowly
and boost certain sounds widely. Well, that’s the width thing,
so it’s the roll-off of the sound.
And then the “Boost” is going to be how we’re going to affect
that sound, whether we’re gonna raise it or lower it.
So, in this case, what we’re gonna want to do
is we’re gonna want to set the center point to 1250 Hz.
This is a pretty good frequency range when we set the “Q” to 4.
This will give us a good spot for the dip
that covers quite a bit of the vocal part
that will usually be muddied up by music.
So we can just do it as, like, a one-setting,
“set it and forget it” kind of idea.
And then we’ll set the boost down to -18 dB.
So that means anything that’s in that frequency range
is gonna get slowly and gradually dipped down
to -18 dB right at the center point of 1250 Hz.
And this should cut out a nice chunk of the sound
while still leaving some of the bass to drive it
and a little bit of the treble, but not have as much
muddied vocals. And that’s all you gotta do.
And then you can save this as a preset
by just right-clicking on it and choosing “Save Preset,”
and then type in something that will be familiar to you.
You could type in, like, “music dip for voiceover”
or something like that, and you press “OK,” and now
you have that preset saved. And now anytime you’re getting
to a music track, and you want to bring your voice back over
top of it, just drop that on. Now, you’re gonna want to use
it only in the certain sections because it does affect
the audio quite a bit. I’ll show you what it sounds
like with it on and off so you can hear the difference without
any vocal parts. All right, so right here in the song,
we’re gonna cut two pieces. Both of these are gonna
be at a normal volume, so we’re gonna set those back--
we’ll put them at -6 dB. And the second clip is gonna have
our “Music Dip For Voice,” and the first clip is not.
Let’s go ahead and listen to the two of those back-to-backs.
[electronic music]
[slightly softer, more subdued music]
So pretty easy to hear what’s going on there.
It just makes a nice little groove there
for your voice to sit inside. So, when you have a clip
that say, you want to come in and out, you’re gonna do it
the same kind of way. So let’s get rid of this junk,
and we’ll move the audio down here, and let’s suggest
that we were gonna play an intro here, and then right
around when I start talking, that’s when we’re gonna want
to have the music dip well.
So during this section here, we’ll cut before and after,
we’ll make a section, and we’ll put the “Music Dip For Voice”
in there. So now we’re gonna want to mess with the levels
a little bit. You’re gonna want your voice to come in
around -4 or -3 dB, and the music, you’re gonna want
to bring that down. But it kinda depends on your voice,
what kind of music you’re using-- is it really loud,
is it kinda soft music-- but I think you can go anywhere.
Even if you just normalize the max peak to, say,
anywhere from -15 to -21 dB, somewhere in there
is gonna be a good spot for you. So we’re gonna set
the before and after music, just to make sure
we’re set up here. We’re gonna set that to -6 dB,
and we’re gonna set the music in between,
when I’m talking, to... let’s do -18 dB.
I like that one. And then on the clip
in the middle here, we have our “Music Dip For Voice,”
and on the clips on the outside,
we shall not have that. And if you want to make it
sound nice and smooth, you can also, as I explained
in the previous video, use something like “Constant Power,”
and just put a Constant Power band-aid, if you will,
at the beginning and the end, overlapping the two clips.
That way, we’ll ease into it and out OK.
Now let’s just sort of watch this clip
with the music like that now.
♪
[music softens & subdues slightly]
[clearly] OK, method one, the easy method:
using a static image. Now, you can do this with pretty--
And we’ll cut to the way that it plays out.
--we’ll save this image as...
[music gets slightly louder & more prominent]
And then let’s just check the vocals
one more time for clarity.
--save this out and load it into the editor.
I’ll show you how to do that because we’ll--
So as you can see, it’s really easy to hear the vocals.
They come in clearly over top of the music,
but the music doesn’t lose any of its flow, so that
when we go from-- like I said, different cutaways of B-roll,
we get, you know, a nice pronounced thing,
the Constant Power brings it down into that music dip
that we made, we play across that, then we blend back up.
And we don’t have any of those jarring sound effects where
all of a sudden the music’s really loud or really quiet,
or the music’s too loud when the person’s talking,
or where the music’s too quiet when the person’s talking,
so that when it comes back in, you kind of forgot that there
was even music playing, and then all of a sudden
there’s music. I mean, that can work if you really want
an impact, but if you want the whole piece to kind of have,
like, a similar theme, and to kind of let the music sort of
flow and drive it throughout, this is probably the easiest
and one of the best ways to do it, and it’s just a simple,
simple-- it’s actually a simple equalizer.
That’s what it’s called, “Simple Parametric Equalizer.”
Just save yourself a preset: 1250 Hz
for the frequency range, a Q of 4, -18 dB.
That should be enough to get the job done.
If you find that your voice is really on one side
or another of that, you can adjust the frequency.
Maybe go to 1000 Hz, maybe go to 1500 Hz,
and try to find the pocket that best suits your voice.
But that’s it. It’s just one number adjustment.
It’s not a complicated EQ or anything like that.
Use some Constant Powers to blend it in,
and then get your levels right. For your music, you might need
-15 dB, -18 dB, -21 dB. Save it as a preset
and keep it as a useful tool in your editor.
I hope you found this video helpful or at least
entertaining. If you did, make sure you leave it a like,
and go ahead and share it with somebody else
who you think might also find it helpful.
But if you did not find it useful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I’m done.
♪