The Essential Sound panel provides a collection of tools for mixing and repairing audio, as well as access to a collection of audio clips from Adobe Stock that we can include in a project. Using the Essential Sound panel, we can tag clips as a specific type of audio — dialogue, music, sound effects (SFX), or ambient background audio — to view specific tools for refining the chosen type of audio.
For this exercise, we’ll be adding a voice-over clip and some background music to the Intro sequence in the Dances project. We’ll use the Essential Sound panel to tag the clips as we add them, then make some adjustments to the clips so everything sounds its best.
Let’s open the Essential Sound panel and take a moment to explore it before we start working with audio clips.
To open the Essential Sound panel, on the Menu bar,
Click Window, Click Essential Sound
The Essential Sound panel will display on the right side of the screen:
When opening the panel, we’re brought to the Edit tab, which tells us to tag our clips in order to use the Essential Sound panel — there are also greyed out buttons for each of the tags we can apply to a clip that indicate the audio type. We can’t do much here at the moment until we add an audio clip and tag it, so let’s add an audio clip to the sequence so we can see the Essential Sound panel in action.
Working with dialogue clips in the Essential Sound panel
The first audio clip we’ll add to the Intro sequence will be the voice-over for the introduction, intro.mp3. This clip should start at the same time as the clip 1_club.jpg appears on screen, so we’ll position our playhead at 10 seconds in on the time ruler first to help us make sure the clip starts at the correct time. After adding the clip to the timeline, we’ll open the Essential Sound panel and tag the clip as a dialogue clip.
NOTE: When completing the following steps, it's possible that your audio clips may already be tagged as Dialogue or Music — this is due to a Premiere Pro setting that, depending on your version of Premiere Pro, may be turned on by default that auto-tags audio clips as they're added to the timeline. To turn this setting off, on the Menu bar, Click Edit, Point Preferences, Click Audio... and in the Audio preferences, Click the checkbox next to "Auto-tag audio types in the timeline" to uncheck it and Click OK to save the changes.
To move the playhead to the 10 second mark on the time ruler, in the upper left corner of the Timeline panel,
Click, type: 00;00;10;00 Enter key
NOTE: Your playhead position indicator may display a different timecode than the one shown in the screenshot.
To expand the Audio bin, in the Project: Dances panel,
Click
To add the clip intro.mp3 to the A1 track,
Press & Drag from the Audio bin to the A1 track on the timeline, with the left edge of the clip lining up with the playhead
To activate the Selection tool, if necessary, in the Tools panel,
Click
To select the clip intro.mp3, on the A1 track in the Timeline panel,
Click the intro.mp3 clip
To assign the Dialogue tag to the selected clip, in the Essential Sound panel,
Click
To start playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
Listen to the voice-over clip to see how it sounds.
To stop playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
The Edit tab in the Essential Sound panel now shows us many options for editing audio that’s composed of dialogue, including tools for enhancing the sound of speech, adjusting the clarity of the audio, and more. We can even choose from a number of presets to make our audio clip sound like it’s being played through a radio or heard through a telephone.
The voice-over clip we’re working with is already a high-quality recording that sounds good, but we can make some minor adjustments to it to help it sound its best. We’ll be adjusting two options in the Clarity group — specifically, we’ll be enabling the Dynamics and EQ adjustments to help give the clip a little boost.
To enable the Dynamics adjustment, in the Clarity group of the Edit tab in the Essential Sound panel,
Click the Dynamics checkbox
To adjust the value for the Dynamics adjustment,
Press & Drag the Dynamics slider to the right until the value displays 3.5
To enable the EQ adjustment, in the Clarity group underneath the Dynamics adjustments,
Click the EQ checkbox
To change the preset used, in the Preset drop-down,
Click, Click Subtle Boost (Low Tone)
To adjust the frequency response amount, underneath the Preset drop-down menu,
Press & Drag the Amount slider to the right until the value displays approximately 6.0
Move the playhead to the beginning of the intro.mp3 clip, if necessary.
To start playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
Listen to the voice-over clip to see how it sounds.
To stop playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
The changes are subtle, but the audio has a little bit more bass and sounds slightly louder now than it did previously.
Ducking background music against dialogue
As mentioned previously, in addition to adding a voice-over track, we’ll be adding background music to the Intro sequence that plays during the entire sequence. While we’d like the background music to play at full volume when the opening title displays, we’d like it to be quieter when the voice-over starts so we can hear the speaker over the background music. We can do this using a technique called ducking, where the volume of background audio is lowered when foreground audio plays. The Essential Sound panel makes it easy to duck background music against dialogue or other sounds — we’ll use the Essential Sound panel to duck the volume of any clips tagged as music whenever any clips tagged as dialogue play.
First, we’ll need to add the background audio clip, Always-GeorgeOlsen.mp3, to the timeline. We’ll also want to trim the clip so it ends at the same time as the last still image clip on the V1 track. After that, we’ll tag the clip as music in the Essential Sound panel, then set the clip to duck against dialogue clips. We’ll adjust the volume of the background music using the Duck Amount slider, and change the fade in/out duration so it’s a little longer than the default transition length.
Expand the Audio bin, if necessary.
To add the background music clip to the sequence, in the Project: Dances panel,
Press & Drag from the Audio bin to the beginning of track A2 in the Timeline panel
Ensure the Selection tool is still the active tool.
To position the cursor properly for trimming the clip Always_GeorgeOlsen.mp3, in the Timeline panel,
Point inside the far right side of the clip until the cursor changes to
NOTE: If you’re having trouble getting the trim cursor to appear at the end of the clip, point to the top or bottom of the clip edge instead of the middle.
To trim the Always_GeorgeOlsen.mp3 clip so it ends at the same time as the last image clip on the V1 track,
Press & Drag the right end of the clip to the left until it aligns with the right edge of the last clip on the V1 track
Ensure the Selection tool is still the active tool.
To select the Always_GeorgeOlsen.mp3 clip, in the Timeline panel,
Click the clip on the A2 track
To tag the clip as a Music clip, in the Essential Sound panel,
Click
Ensure the clip Always_GeorgeOlsen.mp3 is still selected in the Timeline panel.
To turn on ducking, in the Essential Sound panel,
Click the Ducking checkbox
To indicate the clip should be ducked against dialogue clips, if necessary, in the Ducking group on the Edit tab of the Essential Sound panel,
Click
To adjust the ducking amount, in the Ducking group,
Press & Drag the Duck Amount slider to the right until the value reads approximately -23.0 dB
To change the fade duration,
Press & Drag the Fade Duration slider to the right until the value reads approximately 1000 ms
To apply the ducking to the audio clip, at the bottom of the Ducking group,
Click
NOTE: If you make changes to the ducking options after pressing the Generate Keyframes button, you’ll need to press the Generate Keyframes button again in order to apply those changes to the audio clip.
To move the playhead to the beginning of the sequence, if necessary, on the keyboard, press:
Home key
To start playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
Listen to the sequence’s audio, paying special attention to when the voice-over audio starts.
To stop playback of the sequence, on the keyboard, press:
Spacebar
The volume of the background music should lower when the voice-over starts, and get louder again when the voice-over ends.
Applying default transitions to an audio clip
When listening to the sequence just now, you may have noticed that the background audio ends rather abruptly. We can fix this by applying the default audio transition to the background music clip. Once we’ve done that, we’ll save the project.
Activate the Selection tool, if necessary.
To select the background music clip on track A2, if necessary,
Click the clip on track A2
To apply the default audio transition to the selected clip, on the keyboard, press:
, type: 00;00;10;00 
from the Audio bin to the A1 track on the timeline, with the left edge of the clip lining up with the playhead
, 
from the Audio bin to the beginning of track A2 in the Timeline panel
