How To Mix Dialogue with Music for Film and Video

I’m mixing a scene from a feature length film and one of the challenges is that the dialogue and music in this romantic scene are sort of competing with one another which makes for a rather distracting experience. To help the two get along, I ended up using a technique that almost every music mixing engineer uses all the time: EQ. I just cut some of the mid frequencies from the music track to make room for the dialogue because the mid frequencies is where most dialogue sits. And now, they get along so much more nicely. The romantic scene feels romantic!

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Gear used to produce this episode:

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Audio Technica AT4053b Hypercardioid Small Diaphragm Condenser Microphone (Used to record intro)

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Tascam DR-60DmkII Audio Field Recorder

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Panasonic GH4 Camera

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Olympus 45mm f/1.8 Lens (My favorite m4/3 lens)

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Atomos Shogun 4K HDMI Recorder

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Shure SM-58 Cardioid Dynamic Microphone (used for voice over)

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Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP Audio Interface

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Photoflex Starlite QL Softbox Kit (this is my key light):

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Music copyright Curtis Judd 2012

[ZebraMonkeys]

This is such an elegant solution to a problem that's been bugging me for an age, thank you so much!

[valdensefilms]

Curtis. Thank you for this tutorial. The essence of the conversation needs to remain clear and without distractions and this helps so much. Working with you as an audio editor for this film is awesome. Your knowledge raises the quality of the scene itself to a higher level of professionalism.

[vinloc]

THANK YOU SO MUCH CURTIS!!! I was stuck on a film I'm working on. Couldn't figure out the range to EQ the music to mix in the dialogue and foley. You're the man!!!

[scotthimel]

Curtis: you are the man! These videos are so helpful for an amateur photographer and videographer like me!

[dogman]

I've found it also helps to add a good bit of compression to the dialogue track and then compensate by adding gain. This is particularly true on narration / voice-over, since you usually want the POV to be like the sound of your own voice inside your own head, and that's sort of naturally compressed. You may want to compress the dialogue of the main character for similar reasons. The dynamics processing that comes with Adobe works quite well. Very natural sounding compression.

Note that many music tracks are already compressed when you get them, so compressing the dialogue just levels the competition.

I've also experimented with automatically ducking the music, or manually varying the music during weak bits of dialogue, but this often sounds worse. You want the music to be fairly steady as an emotional foundation. If anything, I'd rather manually raise the weak bits of dialogue slightly, as long as it doesn't sound strange.

Another trick, use a high pass filter on the dialogue, around 80 Hz. This sometimes clears up the dialogue, separating it from the low end of the music. It sometimes also helps to eliminate any handling noise from the boom operator.

[TechforToastmasters]

Everyday I learn something new from you.

[BasicFilmmaker]

Extremely useful info Curtis. Mr. NOT sound guy here would like to know how I can nail exactly where the dialogue lives. Wouldn't it be different for any given scene depending on the actors voices? If so, how do I determine where to cut the sound track? Hopefully that makes sense.

[AustinParenti]

This is one of my favorite and most helpful channels I'm subscribed to. Please keep up the great work :D

[bradpierce]

Hey Curtis! Nice vid! I watch your vid's to get more knowledge about camera's and stuff. Thanks for doing them! I'm a music mixer by trade and I had some thots about audio mixing that NLE guys have to deal with. I've always noticed that vid people are usually less knowledgeable about audio production than us audio guys. And we, the audio guys, generally suffer in the video world :-) So, what your dealing with in this video is called "masking". We deal with that all the time in music mixing. When Im mixing, I'll generally dive into analysis pretty deep to find out what I need to do to solve masking issues. Video editors would benefit too. With a bit more info on what makes sound, it might help with masking solutions. There's also some really cool techniques, using plugins, to solve problems in production. Not sure if NLE's can do some of the techniques. If you think your viewers might benefit, we could do a online meet and discuss some things they might try when dealing with audio in film. I think it would be a fun discussion hearing about stuff you come up against in film and how to go about solving things. Take care and thanks for all your cool vid's! Best! Brad P

[GrimaldiSound]

What works even better is to low pass filter some of the highs out of the music as well with a gentle slope - especially if there's a lot of detail in the high end that could be distracting to the dialogue (works great in music as well)! Even better if you can use a Mid/Side EQ and low pass the highs but setting that filter to 'mid' mode! That way you can keep the detail and high end in the music, but really carve out all the distraction from the top end and where the vocal is sitting, without just scooping where the vocals are in the music. This makes it a lot more transparent!

[Harryofalltrades]

This a great idea. I've always had to lower the background music volume really low making it hard to hear. Some YouTubers like to cut the music volume abruptly when they start taking and then raise it back up when they stop. I find this this really distracting especially when you have multiple volume changes like this in a short span of time. My preference is to have background music set at a constant level. I'm definitely going to try this trick on my next video.

[ppractical]

I would say besides EQ a subtle side-chain compression could be very useful too.

[JimberJam]

I'm going to try this right now for a mini-documentary I'm working on! Thanks Curtis Judd

[atishep]

Also, a compressor/limiter can be useful to reduce the dynamic range of the material (guitar track in this example), so the peaks don't get too loud.

[DreamhouseVideography]

Awesome, Curtis! This is the first I've heard of this. The difference is quite noticeable. A very useful piece of advice. Thanks!

[Digitalmixes]

Just mixing my first feature with Nuendo which I am learning at the same time, plenty of experience in other audio areas but boy is it a challenge. Cannot wait to try this idea out, thanks. Got loud music and vital dialogue going on. The film's called 'Who's watching Oliver' so if you see it around see if it worked!

[GregWallis]

Really great tip. Your convivial presentation skills are, as always, a credit to you.

[codyclarke]

Hey Curtis, great video, I think you answered this before but I can't find it: what lavalier mic do you use for making your videos?

[HarDeHarComedy]

Awesome tip! I'm usually messing with volume and high/lowpass settings to accomplish a harsher sounding version of this. Definitely going to be using this method for now on.

[NutcrackerfilmsUk]

Hi Curtis,
I've noticed you refer to LUFS in relation to audio. What is this and how does it relate to dB and dBm?
Thanks in advance. Adam.