Add and adjust music for your soundtrack

Now, to flesh out our movie and add a little bit of excitement, I'm gonna to add some music to the beginning and let it flow into the opening shot, and then fade it down so we can actually hear the host and myself speak.

If you look over in the project pane, there is folder called Music, and once again, I can either double-click it or drag it into the source monitor, or I can actually even right-click it, and there's an option towards the very bottom of the dropdown menu that says Open in Source Monitor. And as you can see, this is the waveform of the audio file that I'm gonna to go ahead and bring into my show.

Let's briefly take a listen to the opening of the song. [pause/play press spacebar] I think that's nice. It sets the mood that we're gonna to be making some sort of an Italian dish. I'm ready to bring it into my timeline. I can simply grab the audio waveform here and drag that down and drop that onto track two. Now if you notice, if I just dragged it and let go anywhere, it might not be at the beginning of my show, so I need to make sure that I drag it all the way to the left.

Let's listen to how this sounds while watching the video. Well, I love the music, but it definitely has to be lowered when Vanessa starts speaking, and I may want to raise the volume of her voice up a little bit higher. This is very easy to do in Premiere Pro.

What I want to do is open up the audio tracks a little bit, or make them taller so I can see the audio waveform. To do this, I can place my cursor directly over where it says A1, and I'm simply using my scroll wheel. [change track height scroll wheel] And I'm making the track taller,[change track height scroll wheel] and now I can actually see the waveform for Vanessa. And then I'm gonna to scroll down a little bit. So I can see audio track two which is on music and do the same thing.

If I wanted to, I could hold down the shift key. [change all track height shift + scroll] And that would expand all of the track at the same time. To see this a little better, let me adjust my window so we see more of our timeline and less of the video.

Now depending on the resolution of your computer screen, you probably can see both the audio tracks and the video at the same time without having to change your layout. So as you can see, I now have my music and I have my voice. And if I want to change the levels here, all I have to so is hover my mouse between the left and right channel and I can actually make them louder or softer by simply dragging my cursor up or down.

I'm gonna to go ahead and bring the audio down to where it says about -19 or -20dB, dB stands for decibels. And if I go ahead and play that and look at my meters...Oh, that's a little bit too soft. I want to bring that up a little bit ,just so that the meters on the far right hit about -12.

Now you can simply guess or you can actually do that while the music is playing. I'll do the same thing to Vanessa's voice because I want her to be a little bit louder, and I will do that while I'm playing. I'm gonna to place my cursor on top of that middle line, press the Spacebar. So, her voice is a little bit louder, and the music is good at the beginning, but when she starts to talk, I'm gonna to have to put in what's called a keyframe, or break the audio so it dips down underneath her voice. I'm gonna go ahead and press the Backslash key.[fit to window press"\" key] That will allow me to see my entire timeline, and what I want to do is put what's called a keyframe right at this point and break the line.

Now if I continue to scroll a little bit more to widen this out, you'll see, as I scroll down, in addition to seeing the audio waveforms, I also get two little arrows and a button that allows me to add or remove my keyframes. So what I want to do is simply slide the playhead over here when we start fading in. And I want the music to start dipping under, right when we start seeing Vanessa. And I'm gonna to go over here to press this button. Now, if the button is grayed out, make sure that clip is selected. Click on the little diamond, add a keyframe, and then move the playhead over a little bit, and you can click that button again. And now you have two keyframes.

If I want to lower my audio, you definitely need two keyframes to create that ramp or that break. If you only have one keyframe, you'll bring the volume down for the entire clip. I'll simply move my mouse over, lower this dramatically. Oh, I guess about -30,-35dBand simply hit the play button, and see how it sounds. Well, I think that's a little bit too soft and probably a little too dramatic, so let me go ahead and make it a little bit louder. And see how it sounds next to her voice.

Now I want to sneak the audio out, so I'm gonna to bring it down to an absolute volume of zero, and I can do that by once again putting in a keyframe moving forward a little bit, putting in another keyframe, and dragging that all the way to the bottom to where it says -infinity dB, and you'll see the music fades out.

If that seems a little bit too abrupt, I can simply drag that over to the right and it will fade out slowly. Now let me scroll over and adjust the height of the line a little bit and the location, so we can see on track one that the volume has gotten unusually loud because from that angle we just had a camera mic on.

Now ultimately, I would actually replace that audio with clean audio from camera one, but for now, I just want to reduce the volume level so it doesn't leap out when I'm working on my rough cut. Again to do that, I would simply grab the line over here and pull it down and take a listen. So that's pretty loud, let me bring it down a little more. [zoom in press"+" key] If you can't quite grab it, go ahead, press the Plus key to zoom in. And we'll bring that down to about 13 and see what that sounds like. So that actually kind of smoothes it out a little bit. And I want this audio here to match with this audio here, so I'll simply visually grab that and bring that up so I can kind of see where it is.

Hit Playback.

And we'll learn how to finesse that audio so that it matches later on in the course. As you can see, adding music to a program is pretty simple. It's just dragging it to an unused track, adjusting the volume, and fading it out when necessary.