5 Sound Design Tips (Premiere Pro Tutorial)

Published on June 16, 2021

Audio Effects

audio, audio panning, EQ, equilizer, pitch shifter, reverb, Sound design

5 tips to optimize your sound design in Adobe Premiere Pro

Sound designing a video is super important. It can literally draw the viewer into your story/shots. But how do we optimize the sound or the overall design of it? Well here are some quick tips that you can do to your sound in Adobe Premiere Pro!

Tip 1: Gathering sound

The first tip isn’t actually in Premiere Pro itself, it’s the production that comes before. Try to record as much audio as possible while shooting. This can be the actual sound or you can create your own foley sound afterwards. You can even fake specific sounds by recreating them with tools or with your mouth. If there are still some sounds that you can’t record, try to find them on online libraries and download them.

Tip 2: Creating ambient sound

The second tip is to create your own ambient sound. That means that when you are shooting on a specific location like a factory for example. You should try and make the factory ambient as accurate as possible. That means machines, levers, buttons being pushed, people, etc… All these noises combined create the ambient but make sure that their each loudness level is mixed well.

Tip 3: Reverb and EQ

When mixing your sound design, make sure to add some reverb and equilizing to it. A neat trick to get a proper reverb is by using the cutoff trick. Add keyframes near the end of your clip but extend it. Eventhough the sound of the clip won’t play anymore, the reverb will still be heard a bit.

When using the Essential Sound panel in Premiere Pro, don’t always put the exact audio type on your sound. It’s always nice to play around with the different types and presets to create different sounds.

Tip 4: Audio panning

Audio panning is a nice way to give a new experience to the listeners or viewers of your video. You can select your clip and from the effect controls panel you can animate the panner. -100 means all the way to the left, 100 is all the way to the right. By using some keyframes you can create a cool animation where the audio starts from the left and goes to the right, or vice versa of course.

Tip 5: Pitch Shifting

The final tip is about pitch shifting your audio. You can do this in different ways, either you use the pitch shifter effect from Premiere. Or you can use the rate stretch tool to alter the time of your sound. Making it slower will make the sound more deep, making it faster will change the pitch to a higher tone. A clever way to use one sound clip but alter it to let it seem like they are different ones.

Feel My City sounds competition

The video that I’ve made for this tutorial is my submission for the Feel My City Sounds competition by Hollyland. You can win over $50.000 of filmmaking gear so I recommend participating as well! We also had the privilege of receiving the new LARK 150 wireless microphone which is honestly really good. If you want to know more then check out our tutorial or their website.