Changing Volume Between Audio Tracks

[samth]

You might want to try the following tip:

@Austin

When people mix speech tracks with music tracks, they often create a “swell” in the human voice range of the spectrum because all tracks are contributing to that range (music has sounds in the speech range too). This hot spot in the spectrum is bad news because normalizing the finished audio will cause the speech range to top out before the rest of the spectrum can top out, meaning your bass guitars and high-frequency sound effects will sound unnaturally quiet compared to the doubled-up speech range. This spectrum imbalance makes it harder to “sound loud” even though you’re punching at -13 LUFS. The solution is to create a hole in the music tracks so that music and speech don’t combine to make that part of the spectrum sound twice as loud as it should be.

To do this with Shotcut filters, mute everything except your speech track, then play it back while watching the Spectrum Analyzer scope in Shotcut. Notice which bar in the graph is consistently taller than the rest. (Widen the window dock so you can see every label on the graph.) For my wife’s voice, she usually talks at 500 Hz. Next, we go to the music tracks and add a Notch filter with a center frequency of 500 Hz (or whatever your fundamental speech frequency is) and a bandwidth of 150 Hz. This reduces the volume of the music in the frequency range that your voice is talking in, effectively creating a “hole” in the music for your speech track to fill. Now, when speech and music are summed together, you maintain an even frequency spectrum instead of doubling up in the speech range. This lets you raise the overall volume louder than you normally could, and most importantly, increases the intelligibility (clarity) of the speech because the music isn’t drowning out the speech anymore.