Finding appropriate mood for music in Premiere Pro

Hey everyone, in this video we pick background music for our video. We play a lot with the timing. Now just so you know, you might be looking at the length of this one, going, "Oh, there's lots of value in this one, it's a really long video." It's not particularly true, it is a lot of waffle, and I leave it in here because I find that when I'm doing these tutorials, I'm very concise and, you know, succinct, and we follow along, and it's great, but this one here, there's so much timing, and, like creativeness. There's no, like really specific tool to be doing. It's trying to get this balance of audio versus video, versus background music, and kind of baseline drops, there's a lot of messing about. 

So there is a chunk of waffling in this one. I know there's a lot of waffling in this intro as well, but what I want you to do is follow along, definitely, but if you do find, because I chop and change so much you might find that it might be easier, you don't have to, but there is a file that I've saved at the end of this to get you to where I am. I would just keep going with your own version, but if you're just, like, "Man, this dude's waffling too much, I'm just going to catch up with him", in your 'Exercise Files', under 'Project Files', there's one called 'Picking Music'. You'll have to open it up, it's probably going to need you to re-link the music. We've done that, or relinked the footage. You've done that in a previous earlier video, you might have to go back to it, but hopefully when you relink once you'll be able to relink all these footage, otherwise carry on your own one. Yeah, let's get started. 

Actually I'll play this through, it's where we're going, ready? "When I first started doing Parkour is five years ago, and I was doing just some small little jumps." "Watching videos of others and blowing my mind, that some people can jump so far and do all these awesome tricks." "I realize that there's no limits, all limits are inside your head." That's kind of where we get up to in this video. All right, let's get going, let the waffle fest begin. 

The first bit of music I want is, this first bit, it's, the guy's talking, slow motion. It's all very-- I want to add some drama. The interview itself is a little bit plain. "I was doing just some small little…" It's fine, but yeah, let's add some drama, and I-- just so you know, I'm never looking for a bit of video that's going to do-- audio that's going to do the backing for the entire thing. Just the timing can never be found. So I'm going to find a better music to start with, and then kind of launch into something else. And how do I pick music, I don't, I just get started looking for stuff, start throwing it into the Timeline, and see what sticks. 

There's a lot of times where you're like, "Oh, this is going to be great," and you find it on, let's say, YouTube Music, or one of your stock library song sites, and when you actually add it to the interview, or the video, it either bombs or does really well. So what I want to do is, in here what I did is I went to-- remember, check out that the link of this is in your Links, Word doc, and in here I went Genre mood, and I was like, looking for this kind of, either dramatic or sad, I had to play with both of these, and I spent way too long. I spent so much time looking for the right music, and playing and downloading, but this is kind of where I ended up. 

I just kind of like started working through these, just trying to find the right one. I ended up with this one called Towards Us, which I've got in your exercise files. So the nice thing about this one as well, it's free to use, and monetizing your video-- if you've never heard the word monetize, it just means, as a YouTube creator you can turn it on a box that says, I will be willing to run ads over my videos, and get paid a small part of it; cool. So even though I wanted dramatic I kind of really like this one. Especially when it gets started, it's got this kind of--

Anyway, so I downloaded it and installed it, I went through a bunch of them. I've got a couple more, that are in your exercise files. So there's a few of them in here that I got from YouTube. Now you can go and download your own one. We'll work through this together, just do this with me, and then you can go pick your own one, because you're like, you might hate the music I've picked, very personal. 

So let's have a little look in Premiere Pro. In your Audio folder it should be up for you to pick from. We're going to this one called Towards Us. So I'm going to drag this on to the next available space, which is A2, and I'm going to drag it up a bit bigger. What I found with this one is, "I started doing-- when I first started…" Got this kind of like weird walking noise at the beginning. I just want to get started here. So I'm just going to drag it along to this kind of part, and just see how it starts, just have a listen. "I started doing-- when I first started doing Parkour…" You might want to get it to fade in, but… 

"I started doing, when I first started…" Maybe we'll do that. Let's add a quick little audio transition, and we'll just put in that, and we'll make it a little bit short, just to kind of ramp it in. "I started doing-- when I first started doing Parkour…" There you go. So get started, it's quite loud in comparison to the-- in comparison to this. So the dialogue, so I'm going to select it all, so I'm going to select-- This is a good trick, I need to adjust all of this up, so if I select them all and make it a bit bigger, I can drag one up but not all of them. So if you want to just do them all at the same time, you select them all, I just kind of made sure I can see this side and just drag a box around them all, and over here, in my 'Essential Sound', it's 'Dialogue', you can do them all at the same time, if you drag this one up. 

Doesn't change the look of this one, which is strange. It's like an effect that's applied, so these don't go up. Like they have in the past, when we do our Auto Loudness, but you can just raise the level of them. "Watching videos, I always think…" What we might do is solo it, remember, solo means only play this audio track, not this one. We could have muted that one, would do the same thing. "Blowing my mind…" You can see it's bouncing in the right place. "Jump so far and do all these awesome tricks." "I realize that there's no limits, all limits are…" It's kind of need to be a little bit higher. I could use the Loudness Auto Match, I just wanted to show you a different way. 

So I'm going to un-solo that. So hopefully now, "I started doing-- when I first started doing Parkour is five years ago…" So this needs to come down a little bit. I'm trying to get this balancing between these two. "…watching videos and…" - And remember, in my head, always, whenever I think that's perfect, I lower it down a little bit more, because I always have the music up too high. How do I know? Because of all my YouTube comments, like, "Great video, music was too loud." Let's look at adding another bit of audio. 

So what I wanted is when he starts getting into the Superman jump, I want people to kind of launch into some, like really crazy big… "I realize there's no limits." Kind of this, I want, boom. I want him to kind of launch into some, in my head I was like some dub step, that was going to be it, some angry mad dub step, and just so you know I went through, searched for ages, trying to find the right angry mad dub step, and I added them to the track, and I played with them all, and then I realized I didn't really want angry and mad, not for any other reason other than, it just didn't suit the scene, and what I was trying to do. So I ended up with some kind of more dance stuff. 

I'm going to show you Envato, remember, this is a paid one. Link is in your Links panel, it's called Envato Elements. The cool thing about this is that as part of that subscription, it is music as well. What I really love about it, it's a small thing, is to be able to see this waveform, because what I'm looking for is, let's say over here I'm looking for, sort by, let's do a search, I'm going to do a search for "dub step." I end up doing two searches, dub step singular, and dub step together, just, because it does actually give you different results. Then I just spent time going through because what I really want is, to build up into this, like I want a big drop when he jumps off. So I looked at this one and I'm like, I can see instantly from the waveform, it's not what I want, I want this kind of like moving into it and then, boom. 

So I want something more like this. It's not what I want, I'm looking for the big dramatic drop. So let's have a listen to this one. Kind of what I want, you'll also hear the word audio jungle; listen. You can kind of hear it in there, it's easy at the beginning. So they overlap audio jungle in there, it's not part of the track, it's just there so that while you're previewing it, and haven't paid for it by downloading it, as part of your subscription, they add that, it disappears once you've downloaded it. So I just spent my time going through, I've downloaded a couple, both from YouTube, I typed in "dub step" in here, down in here. I can't remember where I got to, like how many pages I went through listening to all of this stuff. Just know that you might be different, you might zone in on the thing you want really quickly. I spent a really long time, it's like searching for stock images. It's the same thing, I spent forever searching stock images. Most of my professional time is wasted looking for the right image, or the right font, or the right music. 

Anyway, so I've found it, I downloaded it, it's just part of it, it's the first, like 18 seconds of it or something. I can't give you the full version, obviously, because it's paid, part of that paid subscription. So let's start with this one, let's add a few different ones I added, and I'll show you my process. So in Premiere Pro, I'll show you what I do. First of all I don't have much video, so I'm going to use this to scrub this up a little bit, so I can see more audio down here, and when I'm dealing with the audio tracks, I'm probably going to go a lot of full screen as well. 

So remember, that's the Tilde key on your keyboard; that's the wrong key. So I'm going to do this, the Tilde key, just to go full screen, and I'm going to do a couple of things. I'm going to get my Playhead to where he jumps, because I want him to kind of like – “…awesome trick, I don't like that there's no limits…" - jump, kind of about there. I'll have to get the timing right, a little bit later on, but I'm going to put in a marker. I'm going to have nothing selected, just click out here, hit 'M' on my keyboard to have a little marker that's kind of where I want to line it up. I'll do my first one and just see how it goes. 

This one here I'm going to tuck in, because I don't want it to be for the whole thing. Let's add some audio tracks, so you-- we'll start with the one that-- it might be fine for you, might not be. This one here, 'The End Is Near', just dump it in, make it bigger, because I want to be able to see where the-- kind of, riddle kind of goes, kind of launches, the drop. See, that's what I was thinking. Big angry dub step, I love a mere bit of dub step, but it didn't end up working in this case. So I'm looking for, basically see this peak here, I want it to kind of be around here, and there's no real science to it. Specifically you need to be watching the video, let's have a look. 

"…so fine, do all these awesome tricks." "I don't like that there's no limits." That's kind of what I'm looking to do. About there; I have to speed up the video from about then on. Now there's so much of like, this is where it's creativity, it's like, I can show you how to paint but then it's, there's a lot of like, your own interpretation of what it needs to be, so I'm going to, I guess leave this in because what I want to do is, I want it to actually go fast and then go slow motion. At about that jump there. So kind of when he launches, about there, just about to launch off, I'm going to grab my sweet 'C' key for the Cut, or the Razor tool. I'm going to slice it, and I'm going to change the timing for both of these, because I want it to be going probably fast and then slow, and we have to move that marker. 

So 'V' key, click on this, right click, 'Speed Duration', and I want this to be a lot faster, because, remember it's been slowed down, so I'm going to put this at 200, let's have a little look. That should be the actual speed. "Find they do all these awesome tricks. I don't like…" Still feels too slow. So I'm going to go and trump just about 300%. "…and do all these awesome tricks." That seems more realistic. "People can jump so far and do all these awesome tricks." There we go, I'm going to butt that up to there, and I'm going to move my marker to be about there, and then I'm going to move this, and just kind of see how it goes. 

There we go. "Jump so far and do all those awesome tricks." Kind of there. So now I'm going to dump in the rest of my tracks, and just kind of compare the two. You'll notice you can scrub this to make them all bigger or all smaller. I sometimes do that, I never do that, actually. I do it per track. I do this because some of them I want big and some of them I want small. 

So let's have a look, we've got an Audio 3. So kind of run out of tracks, so we're going to have to add a new track, you're like, "How do I do that?" If I go to my Project, and the other one that I want is, we're going to use 'Cold Step' was another one, and I can't add it, so all you need to do is right click anywhere, kind of where there's nothing. So let's go to this side, over here, right click, and nothing appears. You have to do it on this side, so right click anywhere along. You have to be in the As but just do it just to the right, let's 'Add Track'. Hopefully now there's another one called A4, and you can right click in there, 'Add Track', and just keep adding tracks as you need it, we need five of them. Not Add Tracks, there's two, there's Add Track, and Add Tracks, plural. So you can add more than one, I'm just going to add one at a time. So I should have a bunch of them here. 

So I've got my marker, I can hit my Tilde key to go full screen. Also note that sometimes it's not the Tilde key, it is on most keyboards, all the ones I've ever used, but I have had students who have had weird keyboards. Sometimes it's a different key, you might have to do a little experiment with your keyboard. So I've got those other tracks, let's add this one. Make it a bit bigger, this one a bit bigger. I'm going to add-- where are we? Cold Step, I'm going to either-- grab the middle of this. Here you're in. What other one we've got? We've got our Future Final, that's this one here, And yeah, I'm just going to drag this along till--

So I'm going to solo this one, just listen to when the actual-- so it feels-- where is it? It's about there. So I'm going to drag that, kind of in there. I just keep playing with the-- let's have a look at this one. This is the one I actually picked. So we have to un-solo that one, solo that one. You can, well, you can't really tell but, it's a lot happier, this one here, a lot more-- less kind of dark and moody, and I just stumbled across it, I was like, actually, that's kind of more what I want. Let's have a go. Way too early. It's kind of where I want it. We're going to do some cool cuts in the next video, to kind of cut to the music a bit more, but I guess I wanted to show you kind of my process of throwing things in. 

One of the weird things is that, let's say that I want this one to be up the top. There's no way of actually dragging the layers; strange, huh? You can't drag tracks, at the moment, and this might happen later on, but you can't just kind of rearrange the layers. You need to drag things from one layer to another. So if you want this to be at the top, you need to probably create and-- I'll just show you, the pain. So probably this one, I don't really need it, well, I'm not sure if I need it. This one's my priority, so I'm just dragging it up, and it will try and snap to go where it was before. So I just kind of reordered them. So this one's kind of at the top, these ones, I'm going to keep them around. 

There's so many times where I wake up the next day and I'm like, "Oh yeah, let's listen to that amazing thing I made," then I'm like, "Oh man, that's terrible." And I can go through some of the other options, or I run it past the clients and give them a couple of different options, or they come back and say, "We don't like the music." I don't want to waste, or get rid of these just yet. If you did you just go through and delete them. Just to tidy off this waffly video is, I'm going to just check the audio levels, to make sure I'm not blowing anybody's eardrums. It's probably a bit long there. Blowing everybody's eardrums. So let's have a little look. 

First of all, this one here, what have we got, this one is-- I actually wanted that one on the top, didn't I? Because it's my backing music. So you my friend, are going to go down here. This one's going to go up here, and I'm going to mute that one. I'm going to mute. You can come back up here, and you as well, might use you later on. It's the backing music. "I was doing just some small little jumps. Watching videos…" I'm just listening to the dialogue. 

So what I'm probably going to do is just lower this down. So remember the keyframes. Remember what shortcut allows me to see those, first of all, how do you see the keyframes, or the line? Is remember, you've got to have this, if it's too small you can't see it, so make it bigger. And I hold down which key on my keyboard to give me keyframes? That's right, 'Command', so I'm going to go something like this, and just blow that down, have a little listen. 

"…videos of others, and blowing my mind, that some people can jump so far. I don't like that there's no limits." This is where it gets extra waffly. I'm just playing around with the music, trying to get the timing right. So there's no, like actual science to it. Just me kind of trying to get it how I feel like it works. So you can skip on to the next video, if you haven't already, or you can watch me mess around with everything, because what I think I want is, I want-- I like this… "…inside your head." "Inside your head" is where I really like, so I'm going to move all of that out, because I want there to be a bit of a break, and I actually want the Superman jump to happen, basically where he goes from the big leap, "inside your head," where all the music launches and does all that stuff. 

So let's-- I'll show you what I mean. So Superman, you can come, I'm holding my 'Shift' key, to click on various things at once, because I kind of timed all of this, right? Actually I want just these, and the timing for the jump to come along. Let's have a look. "…limits are inside your head." Boom. Let's see if that work, so solo off , this is definitely too loud. "…inside your head." I can't hear him at all. So I'm just going to drag this side down. "…inside your head." Still even a bit lower. "I realize that there's no limits, all limits are inside your head." That seems all right, it can maybe get louder, maybe it needs to come in just a little bit further along. If you find it hard to kind of move it along, you put your Playhead and it will snap to it. Let's see how that goes. 

So all this stuff needs to be extended out. I'm just going to see what there is, this is the walking. There is plenty of walking so I can just extend this one out. Go to scrub. My machine is struggling. This looks all right. There's quite a bit of this that we can play around with, because we just rough cut that, remember, we didn't put a lot of time into it. The cool thing about it is, when you drag it, watch what happens up here. You can actually see what's getting added. So I can see the end of it there; nice. 

"When I first started doing Parkour is five years ago, and I was doing just some small little jumps. Watching videos of others and blowing my mind that…" Don't like that end part. So hopefully the beginning of it's a bit nicer. Yeah, cool. Let's see how that goes. "When I first started doing Parkour…" There's an audio problem at the beginning here, which is going to save me some time. I'm going to trim that up, and what I want to do, if I click in here and hit 'Del', it doesn't want to bring everything back, which is an interesting thing. Mainly because it wants to bring everything, including all of this, can you see, this back, but that's already jammed up against the end. 

So what we can do is we can grab all of this, actually we'll leave that there, we'll just do it manually, you can move this forward, and then try and use the 'Del', because now there's space for it to come back, but what we want to do is we want to actually just grab all of that. Oh, my music timing's not going to work, these are the issues. So get your dialogue sorted first. "When I first started doing…" Oh. Don't change it at all. It's good, just needs a little bit of break, a little bit of music helps fill that gap. "When I first started doing Parkour is five years ago, and I was doing just some small little jumps. Watching videos of others and blowing my mind that some people…" 

This first bit is way, a little quieter than the second bit, have you noticed? You can actually see it in the waveform, so I'm going to see if I can… "…watching videos of others and blowing my mind, that some people can jump so far and do all these awesome tricks. I realize that there's no limits, all limits are inside your head." That doesn't feel quite right either. You definitely should skip ahead, because I am just making this feel good now and, yeah, you can either keep watching, because you can't reach the Skip button. So I need, I think I need this bit to be… "…all limits are inside your head." That feels a bit better, let's have a look. "People can jump so far and do all these…" Come on, computer. "…jump so far and do all these awesome tricks." "I realize that there's no limits, all limits are inside your head." That could be okay, I might change it later on when we do some cutting to the action, but… 

"…awesome tricks…" "I realize that there's no limits. All limits are inside your head." That will do, I feel like I've kind of got it. I hope that was useful, and not painful to watch. Probably was a little bit of both, but I do find sometimes, because I've already pre-made all these exercise files, that it seems like really easy to do, you're just like, " Ah, just add this, and do this, and it looks great." I spent ages trying to get the course material right, and mess around with music, and play with timing. Even though it's not quite right, but it's good enough for now. All right, that is it, let's get on to the next video.