- Hello, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this video, I'll show you how to mix voice with music
so that the voice can be heard clearly.
(percussive music)
Okay, this is a question I get asked all the time.
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Let's go into Adobe Audition where I've got this lovely
female voiceover from Rachel, let's listen.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you here.
- That's it, and then I've got
this wonderful music radio creative jingle.
(upbeat music)
Which gets really loud at that point, as you can hear,
where I put the marker at the start,
it's not so loud.
(upbeat music)
And we're gonna wanna mix these together
so that I can hear the voice clearly on top of the music.
So I'm going to do this in multi-track,
much easier to mix voice and music together in multi-track,
or multiple clips together.
And you'll see here, actually, let's delete
all the rest of the tracks so we can really zoom in on this.
So delete empty tracks is what we need
and then zooming right in here.
You can now see I've got a voice track and a music track.
And you'll hear at the start here, if I play this.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night.
- That's OCD, that a little bit, if I play that now.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you here.
- Actually it sounds pretty good,
but if I go to a louder part of the music,
it's not going to sound so good.
And this is where the problems start to occur.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you.
- Okay, you can definitely hear the music
is competing with the voice and it's not so good.
So lots of things we can do,
but let's focus in on the quickest fixes
and go more complex as we move on.
So the first thing is to go to the music track,
not the voice track.
We want to work on the music track
and we want to go to the effects rack.
And we want to look for a special effect here
called vocal enhancer, not just for vocals.
There is a music setting here, switch that on and.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose of the best dance music.
- Already it's pulling frequencies out of the music
that compete with the voice, really handy.
Let me play that back and switch it on and off to show you.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you here.
- So as you can hear, when I'm switching it off,
it was definitely increasing
the competitiveness of the music.
So we'll keep that on.
You can do the same over on the vocals, of course.
On that track, I can go into Special.
I can go to Vocal Enhancer.
I can tell it it's a female voice.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose of the--
- Okay, and then obviously, there's compression and AQ
I've covered really well in other videos.
So I won't dive into that,
but you could also do that on this voice.
You could also go ahead and just raise the volume
of the voice a bit, maybe by 1.5 DB,
take the music down by maybe a DB or so.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose of the best dance--
- Already much better, people often say, well,
how much should I take the music down by?
It's all a case of using your ear.
So I might say, well, take it down by two DBs.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you.
- And do you know that's not too bad.
I can definitely really clearly hear what's being said.
That may well be enough for you, there are other ways.
If you go into the Window, Essential Sound panel,
you can actually tell essential sound
this is music by clicking Music,
and that this is dialogue by clicking Dialogue.
And then in the music, you can switch on ducking here,
like duck against dialogue and change all of this.
And it will, look, automatically duck your music for you
with this pink dash line.
So that's quite a handy quick fix as well,
if you really need ducking.
But one of the most accurate ways to duck music
that I absolutely love is to add
a little bit of side chain compression, really easy.
You need to add amplitude
and compression dynamics processing to the music track.
And then you need to click this icon here,
Set Side Chain Input, make it a mono input like that.
Now it goes yellow until I go to the voice track
and switch the sensor up here, so click that.
And then for send one, we just go down,
we go to side chain and we say dynamics processing
on music, that's slot two.
And as you'll see, when I click this,
this icon will turn from yellow to green
to say it has an input, boom, done.
And now as I start to wiggle this line around,
you'll hear the music automatically duck
in reaction, literally in response
to what the voice is doing, so let's play it first of all.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose of the--
- No ducking going on at the moment,
but you can see it's picking up the sound of the voice.
Now let's try moving this line around.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you here.
- So you can, you can actually hear,
the more I move this over here,
the more it's ducking my music.
And if I were to go ahead and turn this music back up
to say, well, plus one DB.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose of the--
- Definitely the music is competing a little bit more.
Now I can drag this line down a bit
and duck a bit more or less to it.
- [Rachel] Your Friday night dose
of the best dance music awaits you.
- You can see the ducking there.
- [Rachel] Here.
- And you can hear immediately,
as soon as the ducking has,
as soon as the voice has finished,
the ducking pulls it straight back up.
It's one of the quickest, most instantaneous ways
of ducking music to voice
and making that overall voice and music mix
pretty well balanced.
If you need help with this or you've got any questions,
do post them in the comments down below.
(upbeat music)
♪ Music Radio Creative ♪
♪ Dot Com ♪