- 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. If you enjoy these audio
production videos, by the way, do go ahead and hit the
like button on this video. Also, subscribe and ding the bell so you never miss another video. 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 ♪
