How to Mix Dialogue or a Voiceover with Music

have you ever found yourself wondering whether you're editing a video or mixing in video music track too loud is it - quiet have you ever gotten feedback from a client where they say hey we can't understand the dialogue the music's just too loud or hey can we bring up the music the piece is really lacking some energy or have you ever watched a video and just been so pulled out of it distracted by all that's going on with the audio it's up it's down it's all out of the place I just can't even focus let's dig into that hello my name is Ryan Monnet I'm a post-production audio engineer for elevation Church in Charlotte North Carolina and right now I want to tackle the topic of mixing a voiceover or dialogue with a music bed or music track underneath it now this can be tricky business I know because it was for me when I first started mixing for post-production you've got a lot of choices and decisions to make on how do I get the dialogue or voiceover to sound present while still maintaining energy with the music track underneath or how do I not get the dialogue in the music track mumbled or jumbled together and have separation and clarity there's a lot going on and a lot to deal with here but over the past few years I've discovered some tips and tricks that have really helped my process in how I mix dialogue or voiceover with the music track still maintaining the separation so you can hear the two distinctively but also maintaining presence in the dialogue and also energy in the music track so right now I'm gonna share with you my process on how I like to mix dialogue - voiceover with the music track underneath it and yes I'm gonna get carried away and I'm also gonna share with you I like to edit and mix voiceover and my approach on how I like to level an audio mix through video let's go so I'm just gonna embrace the obvious yes this is a boom mic and the ironic thing is I will eventually be mixing myself from this boom mic for this video but in this video I'm mixing myself in this video it's like mixing inception it's fine don't worry about it so what I've got here I've opened up a template that I've created which I've labeled talking heads basically a template for pieces like this where it's voice over or dialogue and a music track just simple kind of to track things I can expand it if I need to it's basically got everything I would need for this type of mix so in here I've already created basically a mock session I've got a voiceover track which I recorded myself and then I've got a music bed in here very simple setup I've got a track for the voiceover which feeds a dialogue bus it's a stereo bus the reason for that being if I had more than one voice over a dialogue track I can just duplicate this track and put the other voice on there and it all feed the bus and then later on as you'll see in my mix window I have the option to EQ compress multiband to kind of blend those multiple voices going back to the Edit window then I have a track for once i blable track for the music track I'll put the music track there we'll get into volume automation later and then I have a master track which is where I'll do my final leveling mastering so let's kind of dive in here with step one which would be editing the voiceover I've already kind of done a little bit of work but I'll just whiz by through it so if we solo my voice here hi this is ryan Monett thank you so so I might want to do something like get rid of this breath up here add a little fade and to watch this video I hope that you might get rid of this breath and like the little mouth crackling this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching and I've got a little bit of dead space here I'm actually going to save that I'm not gonna add a fade yet what I might actually do is just cut this and kind of set it to the side add a fade here thanks for watching great you'll see what I do with this I'll a little bit later I got a fun little trick for you know one thing I'd like to do if you should have the plug-in I love to use the isotope mouth de click it is just that so in my voice you may hear subtle mouth clicking noises I just like to bump that up a little bit render this out that'll smooth out the dialogue so there's no mouth clicking hi this is ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching sounds super smooth none of that mouth noise awesome cool all right so that's edited that's good to go now the next step would be mixing if I just unsolo that and go from the top [Music] all right you can see we've got some work to do here the music track is incredibly loud can't hear the dialogue you can see on the mix window here the reason for that being everything's at zero we've got nothing going on so what I'm gonna do is just kind of work through my process on first of all I'm just gonna mix mix the voiceover maybe get that sounding good before we start blending the two so what I'm gonna do is so this again my first step in the process of mixing a voiceover would be just to add a glorified high-pass filter so I've got this set to 100 nothing too crazy and that way it's kind of keeping some low content but you'll see later on I filter that out anyways this is just a glorified high-pass filter from here I like using the fabfilter produce a beautiful de-esser you can select the range here of which you want to des set the threshold how much you wanted like the range you want to des it's got a nice look ahead right here it's it's amazing it sounds incredible so I've already set this to how I want it I'll just unbias it hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also so it's taking care of those s is very nicely my next step in mixing a voiceover or dialogue would be then to EQ now you may be seeing like how I have a in this template in order of which that I like to my signal flow on how I like my plugins this is always changing this is just what I found that works for me best right now the order of which I have these in but I've experimented with doing the EQ before IDs or putting the compressor somewhere else in the chain this is just how I have it right now feel free to experiment with whatever you want there's no right or wrong way to do it so I've already got this EQ kind of honed in on where it's best for my voice I've already kind of mix ahead to save some time so one by pass that hi this is ryan monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational so he kind of got rid of some of the low here another high pass filter kind of cleaned it up a little bit from there after I've done these three things I will then go on to add a subtle compressor with a mild attack and fast release this particular plugin has an analogue feature which I have off otherwise it'll just add noise on bypass this and you'll see just about how much compression I'm doing here just to subtly smooth it out hi this is ryan Monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational okay so we've got that from here sometimes I use this sometimes I don't but I have a multiband compressor so I've got the option here to use this multiband compressor where I can smooth out some frequency ranges a little differently with a separate attack and release times I'm gonna use it for this voiceover just to help smooth it out a little bit hi this is ryan Monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching for me it just brings it to life just a little bit more and you can see is hardly doing anything drastic from here since this is more of a a voiceover voiceover as opposed to dialog for a film where you're seeing the person talking I treat a little bit differently since this is more of like a radio spot type of voiceover without a visual I'll treat it a little bit differently and I might compress it differently so in this next step I use another compressor and it's for that purpose of more of like the broadcast kind of sound as opposed to dialogue for film where you want to do hardly any compression at all there are two different beasts but this is I'm just showing you the process in which how I'm doing this particular spot so from here I've got this SSL compressor again nothing too crazy I've got a hmm not too fast not too slow attack fast release four to one ratio and it's it's just tickling the meter hi this is Rian monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful just very and I've got one DB of makeup gain from here I have the option to I have these two plugins right here I've got this rx spectral denoise and the Rx dialog do you notice I can use whichever one of these I want sometimes if it's a noisy situation I may use both and it may clean it up really well but for something like this where is just tracked in a studio I'm gonna go with the spectral D noise now this little blank spot here that I told you we'd save for later can you think of what I'm putting together now if we want to denoise this the noise floor in this dialog wouldn't it be great to hear just the noise floor by itself so we can analyze the noise for so this special do noise plug-in will know exactly what it needs to filter out so that's why I've saved this for this purpose so I'll just play it it'll loop and you can see here how it's analyzing this noise floor now so what I'll do is I'll hit learn so it's learning the noise floor and so it's got it figured out so I'll stop this and move this aside mute it get rid of it don't need it anymore but now if I play that over this hi this is ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content it's just ever so slightly cleaned up that noise floor brought the voiceover to life just a little bit more created some separation after I'm done denoising I had the option now if I need to EQ it just a little bit more I'm fine with it right now so from now I will go on and I have this l2 as as a limiter but I also use it as a little bit of makeup gain and I'll show you why you'll see right here I've got this wlm meter it's white because I have a third monitor which you can't see where I'm always looking at this guy you'll see it's set to ATSC 885 dialogue it's basically the dialogue loudness meter standard of which dialogue should be for film or broadcast TV I'm always keeping it high on this when I mix dialogue or pretty much anything really just so I can make sure it's sitting in an average listening level so what I'll do is I'll play this log hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also it's a little low so I've got this limiter here and I'll boost it up just a couple DB so that we're living right around this green region which is which is good it's what you want - 24 L K FS is your average loudness for dialogue that you want so I try to keep my voiceovers or dialogue living around this screen and this L - should I need to bump up the gain I can use it for that to have the dialogue living in a healthy range hi this is Ryan Monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational so that green check that means we're in business and real quick I know I touched on this on my last video tutorial on how I make sermons for broadcast elevation the importance of loudness loudness is different than just your metering so if we look at this loudness meter hi this is ryan Monnet thank you so much that is very different from any one of these meters these meters are you can set them to different things in Pro Tools but right now they're essentially monitoring metering energy whereas this is metering loudness perceived loudness which is very different than physical energy so this is what I was talking about in the intro on leveling and why sometimes you may have seen youtube videos or videos in general where someone's talking they have a music track underneath them and then they ramp up the music afterwards and the music is way crazy loud and you're like holy cow and you turn that down the music's really loud so this is my little trick on how I prevent that on perceived loudness I'm always keeping an eye on these loudness meters and I'll get more into that towards the end when I master on how I maintain the overall loudness for a piece in general if we do need to ramp up music after the voiceover alright so our voice over is in good sounding shape now we can get on to blending the voiceover with the music track hi this is ryan Monett thank you so much hmm okay well the voiceover may sound good but let's get to work on blending it with the music track the first step in this process there are let's see I'm gonna say forest steps that you can take in blending voiceover or dialogue with a music track you can accomplish what you need really in the dialogue separation while maintaining healthy energy and your music track by using any one of these four steps by themself but if you use all four of them it just creates even more so of that separation and energy that makes it really glue together so perfectly so the first step in the process is just overall volume so basically what we can do if I just play this track right here I can just bring the overall volume of the track down I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is Ryan Mona thank you so much for taking the time - okay so we can hear the dialogue now and we can hear the music track we've brought the music track down so we can understand the dialogue but there's still a little bit of competition there's certain words where we still may have to guess with the dialogue saying where it's not clear and precise so aside from bringing the volume down the next step in which we can do and I've already got the plugins ready to go is EQ so when you think about the voice the voice is made up of frequencies like any sound our voice has a certain range of frequencies I obviously cannot go so low to share the same frequencies above a low e on a bass guitar or I can't go so high is the Tagus loud is the frequency content of a splash cymbal on a drum set so what I want to do is in this already produce two-track music track essentially what I want to do is in this frequency spectrum range I'm gonna kind of notch out some frequencies where the presence of my boys lives best so I'll show you how I do that I'll loop this track and unbias the EQ and I'm gonna boost some EQ bands and search for where they conflict with my voice the most and then I will dip those down hi this is Rian Mona thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is Rian monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is Rian Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational alright so right there we've already got something a little bit better I've got the volume down to where I can hear the music track and also hear my dialogue and I've also carved out some frequencies in the music track so that my voice can pop through I've got this kind of high mid range of between 1 & 2 K where the presence of my voice is but then I've also got in between 500 and 250 where I've got a little bit of body in my voice where you can also get some of that as well cutting through as well if you were to just do these two things volume and EQ you would be honestly good to go and get a good separation of your dialogue with the music track but we can do a couple more things to just make it a little bit better a little bit more energy in the music track without having to kind of sacrifice so much equally across the music track so the next step what I like to do is use a multiband compressor again similar to this c6 which I use on the voiceover however this one as you may see is a c6 sidechain sidechain basically meaning I'm using this key input triggered by the voiceover to tell the multiband compressor what to do so you can see on this dialogue bus right here I've got ascend called vo c6 that is the key input of this c6 multiband compressor so essentially when and I've got all these bands set to external so these bands set to external will say okay I'm going to compress based off of the external signal so I've got this multiband compressor on a music track but it's being triggered in compressing based off of what the voiceover is doing and I've only got just a couple bands selected here because I don't want to compress the entire music track all the frequency contact I don't just want to put one one band compressor on it and compress the entire thing I don't want the low low lows that are lower than my voice range to be compressed because then you'll hear it pumping or same thing with the highs I don't want to talk and then have the the high hats or anything like that so that's why I've got just a couple bands of this multiband compressor unbiased and those are same as the EQ in that same range where my voice is present so take a look at this on bypass this hi this is Ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content so you can see how it's compressing based off of when I'm talking and not when the music's doing anything so what I'll do is I'll go through and solo each band that I want such as this mid-range right around where the voice lives and I'll set the threshold basically to where it's kind of just tickling this since this is such a wide band in the middle I don't want it drastically pumping the this entire band it'll be subtle hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you finally come I mean that's - 60 B would be an extreme and this isn't passing that next I'll go kind of in this range where I might have my s's now I know IDs those but this is an area in the voice where you want to have is just some of that the air and this might help some of that separation between like symbol and the air of your voice just in some some of those instances hi this is Ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching so nothing drastic and then on this c6 I've got these two outer bands that can get more specific for more narrow ranges so I'll utilize those in such a way that I did the EQ as well I'll find those certain frequencies where my voice really pops and have those triggered so that those are ducking right when I'm talking hi this is ryan monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is ryan monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is ryan monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching hi this is pretty crazy when you see how I bypass a nun bypass this see sakes how much of a difference it makes it's very subtle but it actually does make a big difference whereas when we just automate the volume and notch out the EQ we are permanently removing that content from the music track you know we can go to town on that but then there's not much left of our music track and this using the c6 sidechain technique or any multiband compressor with the sidechain is really helpful to maintain some of the energy in the music track and not permanently get rid of it so it's there's often been times where I've not even used an EQ and I've only used a multiband compressor because notching out those things in the EQ means that frequency content of the music track is gone forever no matter if I'm talking or not talking it's just gone so something like this if it were a piece where I talked a little bit and then the music plays and then I talked a little bit in the music plays instead of having to like Reata mate which I'll get into later volume and whatnot something like this is perfect because only when I'm talking it's dipping that frequency range of the voice and then when I'm done talking it's back there again like the last two steps if we stopped here we would be good to go and this voice over this music track we could blend it it would be great but there's one kind of two more steps just to make this just a hair bit more as Tim Allen would say all right so for this last step and a half I've got two plugins that essentially do the same thing kind of I've got both plugins made from wavez center and the s1 stereo imager now this starts to dive into the stereo field so if you think about a voiceover or dialog that's that's one channel it's mono and in the importance of film or anything like that dialogue is always king your voice is always going to need to be right down the center center of attention center of your focus right down the middle unless you're doing anything weird stereo effects or anything like that dialog is king is always going to need to be in the center and so if we've got a mono dialogue or voiceover track but then we've also got a stereo music track you can start to mess with that in the stereo field in that you can create separation so we've created separation within the frequency spectrum but now we can look into our sonic we've got two ears we hear in stereo so what we can do is with the music track so earlier I was referencing this this visual will say in frequency content low high well now I'm going to use it from left right my left your right my right your left stereo field so if we've got the dialogue and it's going to live in the center and we've got this music right here essentially what this Center plug-in will allow me to do is I've got a fader right here labeled Center and within the preset I already kind of have it dialed in so that this Center plug-in on the music track I'm essentially dipping the musical content within the center of the stereo field down so I'm creating so like a lull in the stereo field that the dialogue can sit in a little bit better I'm just kind of like creating a nice little little pocket for that dialogue to sit in so essentially that's what I'm doing here by dipping this Center down I also have these potentiometers right here low high punch and you'll see to the left here Center and then to the right side so essentially I'm putting this musical content I'm putting more of the low-end energy the high-end energy some of the oomph the punch of the music I'm kind of just pushing those to the side to create a parting of the Seas if you will for the dialogue of the voiceover to really be present right in the center and not have any of this stereo like mishmash of information create just more sonically a separation to us even if it's super settled that it's like borderline subconscious we're gonna notice it ever so slightly every little bit that we can do will help so we can comprehend the dialogue better while also maintaining energy in the music I'm gonna toggle this back and forth and you'll hear maybe a subtle difference here it'll help to hear this difference more if you're listening on headphones or decent speakers but let me play this for you real quick this is Ryan monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching so I hope you could hear just the little difference that that made where the dialogue just in the stereo field you almost feel like the music when I when I bypass it kind of collapses in on the voiceover and then when I unbias it it's like it kind of gets out of the way so along with this Center I like to just add one little bit more of just finesse just because I can and I the old habits die hard I don't again much like anything I could stop there and we'd be perfect fine but just for funsies I like to throw on this s1 stereo imager we're essentially on the musical track again playing with the stereo field I'm just making it wider I'm almost again kind of just like pushing the musical content to the sides to give more focus to the dialogue in the center so again this is very super subtle I'm just widening the music ever so slightly this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much so again there you can hear almost as if when I bypass it the music will kind of collapse on the dialog just a little bit now we're creating even more of that separation so now that I've got you can see all of my plug-ins here are unbiased I'm using all the plugins that I have set up in my template so now you would you would think we're good to go but because we've created so much separation now with our EQ our our multiband compressor our our stereo imaging now we have the freedom to bring this music track back up our first initial step was to bring the volume down that blends the dialogue and the music as best as we can but now that we've created even more separation in intelligibility between the two we can bring this music back up maybe just a little bit maybe a lot who knows we'll see and the way that I like to do this now we'll get into how I like to monitor how I like to listen this has a huge factor on how you mix and blend the level of dialogue or a voiceover with the music track how this is done determines how you were listening and also keeping in mind the audience that's going to be listening what you are mixing or producing so a little tip I've learned in the past is that when you listen to anything musical content anything we perceive loudness when we listen to things differently we perceive intelligibility different at different levels so if I'm mixing this at a at a standard like healthy mixing level if I actually turn the volume down on my monitors and I listen at a lower level I will be able to hear and perceive relationships much differently than I would if I had the volume cranked at a super loud level because then everything kind of just becomes noise so a little tip is when you're mixing and you want to hear if you want to see if the relationship between your dialogue and music is if there's enough separation to where you can understand the dialogue clearly what I would do is however you're listening whether it's bringing the master fader down or if you have some sort of like interface with a monitor control what you do is just play it turn it down this is ryan Monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also so in doing that after we've done all the things with our plugins on the music track and listening I can understand the dialogue well I might be able to bump it up just a hair here let's see what we got this is ryan Monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much okay I feel good with that so now another thing that you can keep in mind too is some people may be listening to whatever you're mixing in mono on one speaker and because we did so much with the stereo field we want to check the compatibility or the the translation of how it would sound if our stereo mix got folded down tamato and that also helps me establish and make sure the relationship between the dialogue and the music track is also good that's another final little check to make sure that that relationship is right so not only will I want go through to make sure that the leveling is good by bringing the volume down listening at a low level but also at the same time I'm fortunate enough to have a monitor control station here where I can sum my mix to mono you can also do this in the box too if you want by just taking your pan pots and just throwing them right up the center so what we'll do here is I'm gonna play this again and I'm going to dim it in my control room and I'm as sumit tomahto make sure the relationships good and healthy and if that sounds good then we're good to go hi this is Ryan monette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also awesome ok so listening at a low level some tamaño I was able to understand and hear the dialogue clearly but then I also heard the music track in there as well and I'm hearing some of those musical hits I'm really happy with this now so I would say our relationship between the dialogue and the music track we're good to go now are we done not quite so if we wanted to make this a finished piece we'd have just a little bit more to do and this is where we get into automation if you look at this musical track here you'll notice we've got a little bit of space in the beginning here and then we kind of ramp up into like a musical montage at the end where the voiceover is done and we want to bring back the energy of the music track there's two steps that we can do to really bring this back to life now that our music is kind of set to a level where it should live underneath dialogue if we want to bring this energy back there's two things we can do naturally we can automate this volume line here and that's what we'll do first there's an extra little step after that to really bring back the presence and energy of the music that may be lacking because remember when we talked about EQ we did EQ and not just some frequencies and remember the difference between EQ and a multiband compressor where the EQ the content is notched out permanently so we're gonna fix that here in a second but let's start by automating the volume so maybe for fun here we want to have this music ramped up and then boom right when it hits the dialogue comes in and we kind of fade down into a nice blended level that we have right now I already have the the level set perfectly so what we'll do is well we'll start this fade right after you'll see this musical hit right here so we'll create a little note here and then you can see my my dialog kinda is very heavy here on this first phrase this first syllable so what I'll do is I'll kind of match that with the fade and by time I get to a normal natural talking level is by the end of the fade I'll bring this up - we'll just guesstimate there see how that sounds hi this is Ryan Monnet thank you so much okay I'm cool with that and we're gonna do the same thing but in Reverse to the end now and you may be thinking like okay that was a little arbitrary of why I decided to have the volume there I'll get into that here in a second so I'm gonna take this and add a fade at the end of my phrase here one thing I would encourage you to try and be creative with is how you incorporate these fades and the key here would be subtlety and you don't want to necessarily notice them in the intro of this video I talked about audio distracting you and pulling you out of something I can miss the whole point of the content of this if the audio is all over the place so we want to create something that is not distracting in that flows and feels natural so if you look at this piece right here I'm finishing this phrase and we want our destination our volume the energy of the music track to come back up to its full life you'll look and you'll see we have a hit right here that's almost like a perfect destination of - if we're going to ramp up this music something to aim for so I'll create a little node right here and that'll be our destination of reaching the pinnacle of this tracks musical energy and what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna fade this right after I'm done talking cuz then you would notice that let's just give that a listen see just for kicks and giggles what that sounds like watching see that sounded kind of awkward talk and then loop we're going back up so what we want to do is we want to essentially create a crossfade where as I'm finishing then the music's coming up so it feels a little bit more natural so what I'm gonna do undo that note and I'll maybe start it as I'm finishing this little bit right here now you want to play with this so that this last little phrase we don't want to lose that if you do run into issues with that you can experiment with how you automate the music track or you can also experiment with maybe automating but that last little syllable up just a hair change which maybe we'll do here all right so we've got a note here as this phrase is finishing up our destination will be this musical hit but where do we land this naturally you would think okay if we're at minus 13.7 dB well don't we just bring it back up to zero only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] well that just doesn't seem right and if you look at the meters here while I'm talking but also inspirational thank you so much for watching and that might be something that you hear today whereas if you're mixing by the meters alone you're only looking by your eyes you're like okay my voice over my dialogue I've got the fader at zero that that's looking good and so like I want to return the music to to zero right well but then if you look at your master fader all levels are all over the place and then again remember that the conversation we had about loudness so when it comes to me making decision on where to place the level of this music as we ramp back up this is where I get back into loudness you'll notice here I've got this loudness meter plug-in it's white because I have it pulled up on this third monitor so I'll bring it down this is something I'm always keeping my mind on and and keeping in front of me much like we have a loudness meter on the dialogue bus this one is set to a preset where it's analyzing ATSC a 85 also it's analyzing the entire mix rather than having an algorithm more specific for dialogue or vocals so I'll be mixing and I'll be looking at this the whole entire time hi this is Ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also so as you can see now our relationship is great our entire mix we're averaging right in this perfect ideal lout perceived loudness range watch what happens when we go into this music and it goes back up to zero how much for watching [Music] okay so you can visually see according to perceived loudness that it is far greater than the rest of our mix also the strongest and most powerful tools that you have are the ones I encourage you to use the most the most powerful tool that you have when it comes to mixing editing right here that's right so this is a tool this loudness meter is a tool to help us essentially visualize what these are telling us perceived how we understand and how here loudness meters right now these are telling us energy this meter is telling us loudness how we're hearing it so this is a good visual representation of what these are naturally telling us so if you don't even have a loudness meter that's fine essentially what I'm saying is these are your best tools you can hear how the mix sounds fine and then if we ramp this back up to zero because we're going back to our mind and our eyes of like oh yeah let's put it back to zero where it should belong you'll hear with your ears that doesn't sound right it sounds a little bit way too loud now so what I'll do here is I'll set this fade to a level that best matches according to this loudness meter so we'll bring it back down and see we'll just see what that sounds like how much for watching [Music] okay so maybe if I have it there it minus 3.5 that looks like it's a good like average loudness thank you so much for watching [Music] yeah I'm liking that that's perfect and you can hear it sounds natural as we crossfade once I'm done with the phrase the music comes in it's like it feels like it's living in the same space it's not jumping out it's not random it's not pulling you out of it it feels natural and right now remember what I was talking about the EQ how we permanently notched out this content well let's let's bring that back why not cuz we can right I mean this this track aside from the volume that we just changed is still set to settings that are complementary underneath dialogue so if we want the full presence and energy of this music track to come back up say where you've got a nice b-roll a montage shot here underneath and we really want this to come to life let's put that frequency content back in the mix what we can do with this EQ and most eq's if you're using plugins and Pro Tools have this feature where you can select what you want to automate so I'll go right here and I have all these options of this plug-in to which I can automate so essentially what we want to do is bring the gain back of these bands that we dip down so I'll go to band for gain and we'll add this to the plug-in automation band 6 gain add band 7 gain add cool we got that and you'll notice within Pro Tools on this plug-in they even turned red so you can see that they're ready to go they're ready to be automated what we can do is in our automation Lane here see this plus I can hit that and now you'll see that we have those options in our automation Lane so I'm gonna add those great alright now that we have those much like we automated the volume let's automate that frequency content back in now what I'm gonna do I'm not gonna make each band automate back in exactly at the same time because then again that might be something that we notice it might be less subtle to hear all of this come back all at the same time so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna kind of spread them out a little bit here might make this one a little bit more gradual and then I might make this one a little bit more abrupt and what I'll do here is I'll just bring these guys back up to zero back to their home back to how this song was intended to sound all right there we go so now let's take a listen but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] okay so you'll notice now that we could probably hear that difference now you see here in this automation Lane that before and then we go up we're back at zero so it's flat the way it was intended to sound frequency wise when of this with tracklist makes but you'll also notice that when we played this back ok now maybe it is sounding a little bit too different from this relationship when it was underneath the dialog and now on its own so this is where we will go back to our friend the loudness meter again if you don't have anything like this just use these guys you can adjust the volume now to sound a little bit more natural so I'm gonna pull this up I'll play it and let's find a good blend no thank you so much for watching [Music] alright we got a green check that means we're good to go let's listen again and see how it sounds but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] alright look at that I think we're in business I would say we're just about done wouldn't you there's one last step here to make this guy ready to go ready to ship now before I explain this last step I just want to in case you've been noticing yes I do have here an isotope plugin after the loudness meter essentially what this does it's set to a preset called laptop where in these two bands again it's a multiband compressor but within these two bands it will compress just these mid-range frequencies that on smaller speakers such as a laptop or a TV they might sound a little too heightened so I for the most part always put this plug in with this setting on my master fader my master buss because I know that the majority of my mixes are gonna be listened to on small speakers such as an iPhone or I mix for TV so TV speakers or even a laptop like it says this is a good kind of a helpful mastering tool for me because I know where most of my mixes are going another way you can do this say if you don't have this plug-in that I like to use again using the best tools that you have you'll see I had this third monitor here that's not a monitor that's actually a TV I have it so that my interface I have a signal also going to my TV so normally when I mix I'm listening to my monitors but because I know as I mix TV people are going to listen to it on TV I want to know what they're hearing what they're listening through so what I'll do is when I'm mixing something much like I'll dim the signal to hear its relationship or all sumit tamaño to hear how that translates I also I use that word translates that's what you're doing here you want to hear how your mix translates to different platforms in which your audience is going to be listening so what I'll do is when I'm mixing something I'll toggle here on this monitor switch to listen to my mix on a TV and hear how it sounds and from there I might even throw an EQ on the master buss and make some tweaks and notch out some frequencies that sound a little bit to heightened on a TV again that's what this preset does for me I've kind of tweaked a little bit what works best for me and my style but that's just something that helps me out this is nothing that you need this is just an added little bonus tip as I mentioned in the beginning of this video so we're gonna move on past this now to the final final step and that is this l/2 again you'll see it's white because I always have it pulled up here on my third monitor to always be looking at you'll notice that if we play our mix you're looking at our master fader and this l2 but also inspirational thank you so much for watching so if you want this to be on the internet or pretty much anywhere aside from TV because TV has strict regulations on where it's mastered in the level that it needs to be at you're not gonna want your mix to be quiet and again we were mixing based off of perceived loudness as a tool for relationship if you were mixing for TV that's the standard of which you actually need to print your mix app but now that this is going to go on maybe a radio ad or or online we have space to fill here now we can master this so that our dbfs our full scale DB is at zero it's mastered limited at zero so I've got this limiter here limited at zero point one so it doesn't go past that but I've got this threshold here where I can basically use it as makeup gain so I can bring the overall energy of this mix up but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so okay you'll see here that we're catching a little bit of these these bigger transients that the high and some of these hits when we bring the music back so I'll tame this just a little bit so maybe it will catch a little bit of those but nothing more than like 1 dB hi this is Ryan Manette thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] yeah I think that's great I think we got ourselves a good mix I would say we're done now you could if you wanted to depending on where this is going you might even put like a master buss compressor on this ever so slightly like if you're doing something for radio you can experiment with that but for our general purposes and for I'm guessing and assuming and hoping most of yours I would say that this is good to go look at that we've got ourselves a clear beautiful dialogue we've got great separation between dialogue and the track however we still got energy and presence and tangibility with the music track and then we're bringing it back up and the piece sounds cohesive it doesn't sound too drastic and different when the music track comes in we've got ourselves a solid piece here it's at a great level and I'd say we got ourselves a beautiful little mix here let's take a listen one last time hi this is ryan Monnet thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video I hope that you find the content not only helpful but also inspirational thank you so much for watching [Music] alright that'll about do it thank you so much for watching and I really hope you enjoyed this video I hope you got some new insight and new ideas on how to mix dialogue or a voiceover with the music vet underneath it if you have any questions definitely feel free to leave a comment below and I'll get back to you or head to my website ryan Monette comm head over to the contact page and it'll send me an email it's as simple as that alright friends thank you so much for hanging with me we're done here now get out there start mixing take care [Music]

Channel: Ryan Monette

Views: 26,303

Rating: 4.9357061 out of 5

Keywords: Audio, Mixing, Tutorial, Dialogue, Voiceover, Music, Post Production, Elevation Church, Elevation Worship, Audio Recording, Recording, Studio Mixing, Waves, Izotope, FibFilter, Pro Tools, YouTube, Mix, Avid, Universal Audio

Id: H4-lKFo89vQ

Length: 50min 24sec (3024 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018