How to Edit Music and Sound Design - Premiere Pro Tutorial

What's up everyone and welcome back to the channel. I hope you enjoyed that little fun video that I put together for Artlist, who is the sponsor for today's video. I'm actually so excited to be partnering with them because they've been my go-to source for music and sound effects for all of my recent projects. And when they reached out to sponsor the channel, it was such a perfect match that I can't believe it actually happened. So in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the music and sound effects and how I used Artlist to help me find the music and the right sound effects for the video. So let's dive straight in and start by talking about the music for my video. Normally, my process when it comes to music is to have an idea in my head about the style that I'm trying to go for and whether the video is going to be like romantic, sad, or happy, or energetic, or dark. And having the right song for any project is incredibly important because it just sets the mood and the tone of the whole video. For example, if you're going for something like a lighthearted, you don't want to pair that with really angry sounding music. That just, you know, wouldn't make any sense unless you're going for that contradiction. Otherwise, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. And so I knew I wanted my video to be sort of funny and a little bit weird and quirky. So we have to find the right music to fit that type of vibe. So when I'm looking for music on Artlist, that's what I'm going to be keeping in mind. So we're going to head on over to artlist.io. And on the homepage, you get a bunch of these songs and music that are sorted by staff picks. So these are staff picks of all the songs that are super popular right now. And so over here on the left-hand side, you have mood, video theme, genre, and instrument. You can actually go into them and choose different categories of music according to what you are looking for for your video. You can go to a video theme and choose from a bunch of different categories like weddings, documentary, education, go to genre as well. There's acoustic, there's funk, there's hip hop, and you can even sort music by the type of instruments. So for me, I always start by choosing the mood of the songs. And the mood that I'm going for is going to be groovy. It's going to filter out all of the songs that fit that groovy category. So the song that I use for the video is down here. It's called Superman Soul by Rex Banner. And you can tell right here, there's a microphone icon, which means that there are vocals in this song. A lot of the songs that have vocals come with an instrumental version as well. And you can find that by hitting this little triangle right here, and it'll pop down and it'll reveal an instrumental version. Sometimes there's also other versions that go with the song. For example, the one right below it has no lead vocals, which means it only has the backup vocals. And there's also the instrumental version. So if you want the song without the vocals, but you want the backup vocals, you can still download that song. It's there. So I'm going to go ahead and download the instrumental version of Superman Soul. And you can do that by hitting this little download icon. It's going to say direct download. You're going to click it and it's going to give you the option to download either the MP3 or the WAV file. I usually download the WAV file. And after I download everything, I import it into Premiere Pro. So now that we're in Premiere Pro, let's first go over how I use the music that I just downloaded from Artlist. And as you can see, I didn't start the music right away. I actually had sound effects at the beginning, and then the music starts in a little bit later. It made sense to start the music later because I wanted that quiet morning ambience where you can hear the birds, you know, cars passing by outside and also the alarm clock. And I didn't want you to be distracted by music on top of that. And what I like to do is look for parts of the video that made sense to have the music start up. So the second that I turned off the alarm clock, that's when the music starts. And so I find that to be a really like organic way to introduce sound or soundtrack into your video. So this is just me cutting to the beat right here. There's a bunch of like horns, trumpets and stuff like that, that I really liked. And it just created this like really cool, like staccato sort of feeling. So it doesn't have to be like this extremely boring shot of me walking down the stairs. So instead what I did was cut to the beat. So right. So there's a lot of jump cuts in the middle that make it feel like it doesn't take forever for me to get down the stairs. Okay. And then I'm pouring out the coffee, the milk, getting that back up. Right. Again, the stairs, I want to make jump cuts so that it's not so long of a take. So you don't have to watch me going up the stairs. Boom. And so we're out and we're out of the stairs and we go into the bedroom. Boom. I love this cut right here because there's such a like impactful moment. It's like the moment I sit down, that's when like, you know, the music starts hyping up and like that beat drop is like perfect with in perfectly in sync with me sitting down. And I even make the, I didn't intend for this to make that face. Music was like perfectly lined up with me sitting down and making that face. It was just cool. It's such a cool like moment when, when it happens. And here I'm using this really popular technique of cutting to the beat and that makes the video and the audio more in sync. And that gives you like a more immersive feel to the video. So right there, that, that drum hit right here. Boom. That's a different shot right here. Boom. That's a different shot. When I'm listening to music, I'm always looking for ways to edit the video around the music. So for example, right here, when that trumpet has that like really cool, like three notes that are like in really quick succession, like bum, bum, bum, bum. So what I did was cut up three different shots, three different takes of me being on the phone and lined it up perfectly with the music. Sometimes if you don't know when to actually cut, you can listen for moments like this, where it's like this really impactful, like very obvious, like drop. And that just sort of like highlights that shot a lot more than for example, if I were to move that shot to a different beat or a different point in the, in the song. Yeah. So I'm stringing these four different shots right here again, just to go through the range of like different emotions that I'm feeling and the different like reactions of me being frustrated, not coming up with any ideas, maybe procrastinating even. Um, and I'm just like running out of coffee, uh, throughout the day. And it's a really great way to sort of speed up the action again, like the stairs example, right? You don't want me to, you don't want to see me climbing up the stairs or climbing down the stairs over here. Same thing. You don't need me to play out all of the actions, all of the expressions of, uh, frustration. You can kind of get the idea by having these really, really quick cuts that are motivated by the music. And when you're able to synergize the video and the audio, it just makes the whole video flow that much better. So this is the ending of the song of the pretty much the video. And so what I did here, you can tell that, uh, I've split the soundtrack into like the end of the soundtrack, this one little small little clip right here onto audio track number two. And so what I did here was add a reverb to sort of end the song. And actually the song doesn't end here. It goes on and on and on and on. There's like another like couple of minutes actually of straight song. And I wanted the song to have like more of a natural end. Um, and so adding this little reverb is really critical to having it sound like it ends naturally. And when I'm looking for parts of the song to end, I look for like drum hits, like the beats, they really, really like impactful beats that I was talking about earlier. Like these moments right here are really, really good moments to end the song with and add that reverb at the end. And when you find the part where you want to end the song on, just slip the clip right before it drops and drag it onto a new audio track. And then what you're and go to the audio track number two, and then click on this little triangle to reveal this dropdown menu, go to triangle, go to reverb, and then go to studio reverb. And then you double click it and that'll open up a new window. And what you want to do is set this decay right here from 2000 or 2,500, wherever it is. And you want to drag that all the way to 10,000. And then once you're done and close it, and that should give you enough reverb to end the song with. And what I like to do is add a little crossfade to the end of the clip just to sort of like end it nicer. So it's not as sharp of an ending, if that makes sense. You can play around with how much of a fade you want at the end, just mess around with it until it sounds natural. Really quick, before we move on to the next part of the video, I want to thank Artlist for being the sponsor of this video. Not only do they provide you with really high quality music and sound effects, my favorite part about Artlist is that you don't have to worry about copyright issues when you sign up with them. Not only do they have you covered for your own YouTube and social media channels, but they also cover your clients for their social media channels. So you don't have to worry about them getting flagged for using your work. So make sure you use the link down below to get two extra months for free when you sign up for a four-year subscription. So now let's move on to the sound effects. And these are the sound effects right here that I used. And most of them are from Artlist, but some of them, like the ones where I'm walking up the stairs, I actually recorded that myself. When I'm think about what you can hear inside that world. For example, if I'm waking up in the morning, I'm going to be hearing birds. That's pretty much like universal everywhere. And then also traffic, depending on where you live. And that doesn't matter for this video, but I wanted something with traffic, light traffic that you can kind of hear in the distance, but it's more focused on like the birds and stuff like that. So you know that we might be in a neighborhood, we might be in the city. And so that kind of like gives the video a little bit more character and it builds the world a little bit more. And then the other sound effect that I have is the alarm clock that keeps beeping until I wake up and turn off. And then right here is a, is a sharp cut. So what I want to do, like to make that alarm clock sound more natural, like it actually fit the world is to have like the sound like cut off. Like when you, when you stop your alarm, it just like sound like abruptly just cuts in the middle of it. You can play around with that. I usually like to do it that way, just because it does sound like that's how it is in real life. Yeah. That's how it sounds to me. That's how it sounds in real life. Um, and so a couple of things to note here is I actually put a little bit of a reverb onto the sound effects. So premiere pro has a really cool, uh, panel called essential sound. I know it's not like the best for like, uh, fine tuning your sound effects, but for general stuff, like adding reverb, this is what I like to do. So you can, when you click on a blank, uh, audio sound effect, you can actually choose a different audio type. So for me, this is going to be a sound effects. Okay. So SFX, I'm going to go to creative and click reverb. And then for the preset, I'm just going to do room reverb and leave the amount at five. And so let's listen to it. Yep. And that sounds pretty good. This is without the reverb. It sounds more in your face. It doesn't sound like it actually belongs to the room. So when you add the reverb, it's helps the sound feel more natural and feel like it actually belongs in the room, like in that world of the video, rather than it's very obvious that, you know, someone just to copy and paste a sound and dragged onto the timeline and just export it out. And another thing that I'll do to the sound effect is actually play around with the balance of the track. Since the alarm clock of my phone is on the left side of the screen, I want to bias the sound more towards the left ear because it's like coming from the left side of the frame. So if you listen to it, the balance is at negative 71, which is more on the left side. If you're at a hundred percent, it's completely just going to come out from the left side of your, of the speakers. And so what I want to do is set it to negative like 75 ish. So it's like, you can still hear it a little bit on the, on the right side of the room because it'll, the echo, right? It'll just echo, um, on the walls and then it will bounce. So you can still hear a little bit on the right side. So 75% is really like where I like to have it at. So let's listen to it. So that's what I like to do is to add a little bit of that balance, um, so that it skews towards the left or skews towards the right, depending on where that sound is supposed to come from. So now we go into like me running down the stairs. This sound effect right here of me walking down the stairs is something that I recorded on my own. I used a recorder, just like held it down to my feet and walked down the stairs a bunch of times. And that was pretty much it. There were a couple of different sound effects of people walking down stairs and carpets and concrete and stuff like that, but another one sounded right for the video. Like it doesn't sound like it will fit me walking down the stairs. So I just recorded it, um, using a task and recorder and used it for this video. And it sounds pretty natural. What I did here was just lined up the, uh, impact of with me actually stepping on the stairs. Like as soon as you see this, the foot hit the carpet, that's when you want to line up the, uh, impact on the sound effect. So right here is that little impact right here of me, of my foot hitting the ground or the carpet, right? Boom, right there. Boom. And you want to line that up with the feet hitting the carpet as well. And so you want to line the, all those up. It's like tedious. It's a lot of work sometimes. Um, especially if you're like walking a bunch of like down a bunch of stairs, that's a lot of work, but thankfully it's only like five steps that I have to line up. Okay. This was interesting because you hear the sound of the fridge being open, but you never ever see the fridge being opened. That's something that I like to do as well is to preempt the next scene. If you will, I know that the fridge is going to be open already in the next shot. And so I want to prime the audience by having them hear the sound of a fridge being open so that you don't need to visually see the fridge being open. You just hear it. And your brain just automatically goes, Oh, he's opening the fridge. He's going to get something inside the fridge. And here again, what I'm doing is preempting the sound. Like I'm, I'm playing the sound, the soundtrack of the, uh, water, or this is water. Actually, this is water pouring into a glass cup. And you can find this stuff on Artlist. If you go to Artlist, you go under, uh, sound effects. You can actually search for like all those different types of sound that you need. Let's go water pour. So when you search for water and pour, they will separate the two keywords into its own, like search tag. And so I knew that mine was going to be like in a glass cup. So that's what I look for in the actual sound effects, uh, name. So here I just matched up the water pouring sound effect to the video of me pouring out the coffee, coffee and water. They sound the same when they get poured into a glass cup. So searching for water instead of coffee obviously helps a lot better because it's a more common. So the next sound effect is this clip of, um, this underwater sound. And so I wanted this like really unique, different sound effect to highlight the really cool shot that I had. Um, and so that's another way that you can sort of highlight and emphasize different points in your video by using sound effects. And it just fits, you know, it just fits. I don't know why it's just, it really fits. It's so cool. This is actually a, uh, space divers. It's a water blast impact, like an underwater impact because you see the milk clouds right here. Boom. Right. You see that bottom, like milk cloud right there. It's just like, it looks like an explosion, like milk clouds. When, when you pour milk into coffee, it looks like an explosion. So Oh, like that boom. And then especially when the milk, like when I just like dump a bunch of milk into the coffee, like it's just like almost an explosion. And I wanted to match that energy with a sound effect. Um, and you can find these on art list. Again, if you look up water that's underwater, uh, space divers, that's a really good one. So like, I found different like exploding or impact sound effects underwater. And I use that to make the milk seem like it's like exploding into the coffee. And the next sound effect that I have here is just me typing on the keyboard. This is just something that I found on art list again, uh, keyboard typing. So let's listen to the sound effect that I downloaded. Right. So clearly this guy's just going pop pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. So there's a lot of like pauses. So if you actually watch the, uh, the video of me typing, you can clearly see that, uh, I'm not like doing this, right. I'm like actually going like this pretty much like really fast. So that's what you want to look out for when you're looking for these, um, sound effects is making sure that the speed of it actually matches the speed of what you're doing on screen. So here, what I'm doing is just looking for, uh, my fingers tapping on the keyboard. And so, and then matching that with the, with a little peak in the waveform. And so what I did was just splice up a bunch of different like segments within the little sound effect clip and just matched it and retimed it to how my fingers are typing on screen. And also how fast these words are coming out on the screen. That's pretty much all the sound effects. This last one right here is actually straight from the camera. Like I recorded audio, um, for my camera and I just used whatever audio that I had recorded, um, because it just sounds kind of funny. And then a little fade out at the end right here to just sort of end the sound, uh, a bit more naturally. Boom. And then that's the end of the video. And that's pretty much it. That is a behind the scenes look at how I edit my music and sound effects for every single project. Again, I want to thank today's sponsor Artlist for making this video possible. They provide some really high quality music and sound effects like you just saw in this video. If you sign up for a full year subscription, you get two extra months for free using the link in the description down below. I know this video was a bit of a longer one. So thank you guys for sticking around to the very end. If you liked this video, hit the like button, make sure to subscribe, hit the bell to get notified of every single video until the next one. My name is Alex Chung and I'll see you later. Bye.