How’s it going, everyone? Sean Crone with Sean Crone Audio here, and today I’m going to teach you how you can quickly improve the dialogue for your YouTube videos, short films, vlogs, or whatever else you’re doing.
[Music]
Jumping right into Pro Tools, this is the audio that we’re working with today.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
So, the first thing you’re always going to want to do when working with any dialogue is clean it up. That means removing any unwanted frequencies, boosting some frequencies, and maybe removing some low frequencies, in case your mic doesn’t pick them up well. In this case, I just chopped off some lows, boosted the highs a little bit, and removed some of the 1k Hertz, which is where all of your nasalness and your voice come from. And then, of course, just boost the low-mids. Without it, it sounds like,
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
And then, with the EQ back on, it sounds like,
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
Just some basic cleanup.
Now, what you’re going to want to do is, in your editor, copy your dialogue and then pull it up onto a new track. Then, pull up what’s called a pitch shifter. There’s always going to be a free version of some sort of pitch-shifting in any program that you use, so you don’t have to go out and buy anything new. Now, with this first clip, you’re going to want to pitch it down by about four semitones. And with that layer down with the original, it sounds like,
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
And then, from there, it’s very quick and easy to do the rest. You’re just going to want to copy the clean track again, not the one that’s pitched down, just the clean one, and pitch-shift that up by about three semitones. And I’ll play that for you.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
And then, go ahead and make two more tracks. Pitch-shift one of them down one whole octave, and the other one up one whole octave. And then, layered all together, your dialogue will now sound like this:
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.’
Now, the reason why you want to do this on separate tracks like I have here and not just on one single track is, of course, flexibility. If we have all of these different tracks separated out, then you can actually go ahead and mix. Say you want more of the lowness in the voice, then you can boost that higher than the voices that are higher in frequency, and vice versa. So, I’m going to go ahead and loop this and just play around with the mixing for a little bit so you can hear what I’m talking about.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing. This is test audio for creative dialogue editing. This is test audio for creative dialogue editing. This is test audio for creative dialogue editing. This is test audio for creative dialogue editing. This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
Of course, you don’t have to leave the dialogue mix stagnant like that, just in one position. You can, of course, as the scene is going on or as your intro is going on, or wherever it is that you’re using this effect, automate those faders to kind of give movement to the voice. Maybe the robot or the AI is powering down or powering up, and you want to give movement as that device or that creature thing is powering up or powering down.
Now, another cool thing you can do with these separate tracks is to give each track its own effect. For example, on the up-three track here, I have a reverb plugin. Any standard editor, whether that’s Adobe Audition, Audacity, FL Studio, or anything like that, will have a built-in reverb effect, so you don’t have to go out and buy anything if you don’t want to. But you can add effects to individual tracks. For example, I added it to the up-three, and let’s just listen to how that affects it.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
And let’s say you want that effect on the down-octave voice.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue ending.”
And let’s say you want reverb on the original voice and you want slightly different settings. Let’s just do that.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue ending.”
So, you get the idea. With the tracks separated like this, you have a lot of flexibility with how you can further edit this to fit your project. Now, there’s one more thing that I want to show you here that I find really cool. It’s with the vinyl plugin. Now, if you saw my earlier video last week on the radio voice, you saw that we use this plugin there too. I really, really like this plugin because it has a lot of effects that can add character to certain dialogue effects that you’re doing. So, if you’re doing, like, a radio, it’s perfect for that. Anything lo-fi, it’s great for that. This plugin is free. It’s made by iZotope, and I will be pasting it in the description down below, so feel free to click it. Not affiliated or anything like that. Totally free for you to get.
Anyways, vinyl has this really, really cool feature called spin-down, which emulates the effect of audio playing from a vinyl disc as the record player is spinning down. So, it really gives this cool warping audio slow-down effect to it. So, what we’re going to do here is just loop the playback of our effect now, and then I’ll activate spin-down, and you can kind of hear what it does to the robot voice effect.
“This is-” [spin-down effect].
So, you heard it. It sounded really cool. It sounded like the robot was powering down. And if you noticed any hiccups in the audio, that wasn’t your speakers or any equipment of my own. That was just another feature of vinyl called scratch. It gives a nice cool skipping sound as if there were scratches to a vinyl CD as well, which I think just adds some cool character as, again, this robot or this AI is powering down in the middle of speaking. Once more, just because I like hearing it, this is what it sounds like with the spin-down.
“This is-” [spin-down effect].
That’s it for today’s effect, guys. By all means, always, as with every other dialogue effect video that I’ve made, this is by no means a set hard recipe for you to follow. This is more guidelines for you to get started and edit to make it your own, especially with an effect like this where we have it broken out into separate tracks. You can really dive in here, get creative, add effects to these different tracks, really mix it into however you want for your project. And as always, if there’s any dialogue effect or audio effect that you really want to learn more about, learn how to recreate for your own projects or your own videos, go ahead, let me know down in the comments below.
I’ve had one user, Frappulichi, I believe (sorry if I mispronounced that). They actually asked if I could recreate the voice of Mother Talzin from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. So, that is still in the works and it’s coming up really soon. If you want to learn more about that voice effect and a lot more, go ahead and subscribe and hit the little bell notification down at the bottom, so you don’t miss any videos that do come out.
Thanks so much for your time today, everyone, and as always, I will see you in the next one.
[Music]
