How to Duck Audio In Adobe Premiere Pro - 4 Methods

in this video i'm gonna be showing you four methods on how to duck your audio within premiere pro if you're unfamiliar with what audio ducking is well let me just roll some footage of some ducks and what you're listening to right now is audio ducking i lowered the volume of the music or i ducked the volume of the music when my voiceover came in and then when my voiceover is finished the volume of the music will return to its previous level like this so if you want to learn how to duck your music underneath your vo inside premiere pro let's get all our ducks in a row and start this tutorial method one manually keyframing the volume clip level these top three clips are my vo and this bottom clip is my music before making any keyframes we want to make sure that we're looking at the clip volume right click go to show clip keyframes volume and by default it's probably going to be set to level which is what we want but if it's not this is where you would find it with the selection tool i'm going to hold command on mac or control on windows and as i bring the mouse close to the line on the clip you can see that there's this little plus sign that pops up click on my mouse and that creates one keyframe this first keyframe is to maintain the volume before it then i'm going to set another keyframe where i want it to end up at and before i lower the volume i'm going to go to the end where i want it to come back up to the same volume that it was previously create a keyframe right here and create another keyframe where it will end up now if i click and drag on this middle line and bring it down the volume will stay up right here go down to about negative 20 and then go back up to zero where it was at before this is an example of ducking the music while i'm talking that's manually keyframing the music the only time i would really do it this way is if i only had to duck the music once and then bring it back up at the end this may have other uses but personally over the course of my editing career this is the way that i duck audio the least if that makes sense one method that i do use more of is to add edits and use audio gain so with this method we create little slits right here in the audio and then we adjust the gain of the specific clip in between the audio i'm going to move the playhead to where i want it to go and then i'm going to add an edit right here on the clip or you could use the razer tool to add your edits whatever's best for you now i'm going to highlight the clip in between these two clips right click and go to audio gain now i'm going to adjust my gain by negative 20 db highlight my two clips hit shift command d on mac or ctrl shift d on windows to create crossfades in between those two so visually i like doing this method better than manually keyframing if you have a huge timeline that you're looking down on it's much easier to physically see audio waveforms go up and down as opposed to looking at keyframes on clips if you want to adjust something like this i could double click and maybe do a 1.5 transitions i can adjust the timing of where this phase happens by using the rolling edit tool right here so here's what it sounds like now this is an example of ducking the music while i'm talking lots of versatility here and again i prefer doing it this way of clip gain because i can physically see the audio waveforms but one thing i will admit is this way and doing manual keyframing can still be a little bit tedious so that's why premiere pro has built into the essential sound panel a ducking feature let me show you if you're unfamiliar with the essential sound panel it basically works by tagging your different audio clips by sound effects dialogue music and ambience and then you can add effects to those groups of clips inside the panel let me show you what i mean to begin with if you don't see the essential sound panel you need to go to window and essential sound from there we need to tag our audio clips so like before we have these three vo clips or in this case we're going to label them as dialog so i have them highlighted and right here i need to assign a tag to the selection to enable editing options so i'm going to click dialog now these have been tagged as dialog i have the music clip down here and i'm going to tag that as music with the music clip still highlighted look at this option that we have right here i'm going to check ducking now you can duck your music against the dialogue other music sound effects ambience or just clips that aren't tagged at all since i've already tagged all of my dialog clips i'm going to duck against my dialog there are three parameters that you can adjust sensitivity which sets the threshold that triggers the ducking on the clip the duck amount which is how many decibels you're going to turn down the volume of the clip by and fades which sets the fade timing and duration so like before i'm gonna do my duck amount minus 20 db and to give you an idea of what sensitivity does i'll move this to the middle and hit generate keyframes boom look at that instead of manually keyframing all of those volume adjustments we have them right here on the clip now if i were to take the sensitivity and lower it all the way to zero and hit generate keyframes there's no ducking that occurs if i take the sensitivity and put it all the way to 10 hit generate keyframes notice how it ducks the music once and waits until all of my vo is done and then brings the music back up if you want a happy medium in between no ducking and too much just move the sensitivity fader to however you like and hit generate keyframes until you find what you like this is an example of ducking the music while i'm talking anytime i speak the volume of the music goes down and when i stop talking the volume of the music goes up so if you're new to premiere pro this method of ducking audio is probably the easiest and most efficient to implement but there is one more method that i wanted to show you that may be useful in some situations right now it's probably hard to understand what i'm saying because the person that's also singing in the background music is competing with my voice so one effect to help combat this is a low-pass filter sounds like we're underwater right but you can probably hear my voice so much clearer now this is just one little trick that i like to use if i have to use a background track that has vocals in it by cutting off all of the mid and high end frequencies from our music my voice can cut through the mix let me show you how to do it the first thing i'm going to do is duck the volume like we've been doing so i'm going to go and manually make keyframes on my music track so now to do our low pass filter we're going to go to our effects window if you don't see it just go to window effects type in low pass and underneath filter and eq i'm going to click and drag this low pass filter onto my music what we're going to be doing is keyframing this along with the volume keyframes that we've already done so i'm going to move my playhead here to where i have the music going down so i don't want my low pass filter to start with it the default number that it came with i want it to actually act as if it's not there in the first place so i'm going to take my cutoff and raise it all the way to 20 000 plus hertz then i'm going to hit my stopwatch where my first keyframe needs to go and obviously when he hits the water we want to go down and as it passes through we're going to make another keyframe and in here i'm going to type 500. i find that that's pretty much the sweet spot when using this effect anything above 500 i find that it still competes a little bit with the frequencies that are present in a voice or dialogue so i'm going to move my playhead over here to my next keyframe where my volume is and hit this node to create another keyframe and move my playhead to where we want to restore it and now i want to raise this back up so we have all of the frequencies present in the frequency spectrum so it's this 20 000 plus hertz frequency and now we get something like this hey this is where my vo is going to go isn't that me so neat any of these methods will help you out in your edits please let me know in the comments down below if you're new here my name is javier mercedes and i do video tech tutorials and gear reviews on this channel if that's your thing go ahead and hit that subscribe button and i got some more videos on the screen if you want to check them out until next time i hope you're out there living a life of abundance love bye

Channel: Javier Mercedes

Views: 17,118

Keywords: Javier Mercedes, premiere pro, audio ducking, adobe premiere pro, how to duck music in premiere pro, duck music premiere pro, audio ducking premiere pro, keyframe audio premiere pro, automatic audio ducking premiere pro, how to edit volume in premiere pro, essential sound, audio gain premiere pro, lower audio premiere pro, how to lower volume of audio in premiere pro cc, how to lower your audio in premiere pro, lower music volume premiere pro, mix audio premiere pro

Id: j7Ydp34-wXI

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/VideoEditorCook]

There are more ways than this, but I thought these were the most common.

00:00 Intro And Example of Audio Ducking
00:45 Method 1 Manual Keyframe clip volume
02:07 Method 2 Using Add Edit and Audio Gain
03:37 Method 3 Automatic audio ducking in Essential Sound Panel
05:56 Method 4 Low Pass Filter

[u/Krakenattaken18]

Dude, thanks for this!

[u/Team_Rocket_Landed]

This is genuinely so helpful, audio is always daunting