Quick & Easy AUDIO ENHANCING (Premiere Pro Tutorial)

Published on October 7, 2020

Audio Effects

alex audio butler, audio ducking, audio enhancing, audio tutorial, premiere basics

Get the best audio in premiere pro

We’ve had so many requests about Audio Editing, Audio Enhancing and general questions about Audio in Premiere Pro. So of course we all know the timeline inside Premiere Pro. And just like with video tracks you can have multiple audio tracks. I highly recommend naming these and keeping these very organized.

Organizing your audio

Organize your audio by using different names for the files, even add color labels and of course rename your tracks and place the same audio types on the same track. So that means all voices on track number 1, all sound effects on track number 2 and the music on track number 3.

Audio effects and presets

There are multiple ways to add presets or effects to your audio. But first you need to know if you want to edit a single audio clip or an entire audio track. To edit a single clip you can use a ton of audio effects that you can find in the effects panel. What I mostly use are the DeNoise effect to get rid of background noise and the DeReverb effect to get rid of unwanted reverb in your audio.

To enhance the audio of my vocals I use the mastering, hard limiter, dynamics (or multiband compressor) and parametric equalizer effects. Like mentioned before, these are all effects to use on a single clip so if you want to place them on all clips you’ll have to copy and paste them or use another method, which is the audio track mixer.

But before we dive into that, let’s talk about the Essential Sound panel. When you’ve selected an audio clip in your timeline you can select which type it is in the essential sound panel and add some presets to it. Most of the times it’s reverb that we want to add, especially to sound effects. I mentioned that you have to select the type of audio but what I highly recommend is using other audio type presets on different types. For instance an equalizer made for dialogue audio used on sound effects.

Audio track Mixer

Like mentioned before, the essential sound presets and the audio effects from the effects panel both apply to a single clip. But if we want to enhance an entire audio track we need to use the audio track mixer. At first glance you’ll see that you can’t edit a lot in there, but if you click on the drop down arrow in the upper left corner you can see the different tracks. Each of these represent one of the tracks from the timeline. So this way you can add a multiband compressor, graphic equalizer, hard limiter or mastering effect to the entire track.

Audio ducking with the click of a button

Have you heard about the term ‘audio ducking’? It’s lowering the volume of the music whenever voice is heard so that the music doesn’t distract the audience. We can do this manually by placing keyframes on our music clip in the timeline. But this can take a lot of time when you have a huge timeline full of interviews or voice overs. But with our sponsor Alex Audio Butler it’s all done with just a click of a button. This audio plugin, that you can apply from the audio track mixer, has 4 different modes. One for voice audio, one for soundfx, one for music and a mastering mode. And this lets you lower the volume of music for example. It auto ducks whenever it hears audio from the voice track. You can follow the analysis of this completely live thanks to their Robo Butler. If you’re interested in buying this awesome plugin (which I highly recommend) you can use the discount code PBASICS15 at checkout. This code is avaiable until December 1st 2020, so get yours quick!