24 - Sound Mix

About this video

This lesson walks through a basic sound mix for a cooking video, ‘Getting Sweet with Sam,’ starting from the question of whether dialogue is loud enough and music is quiet enough. The instructor opens the audio meters to check levels, finds the dialogue too quiet for YouTube, and fixes it by selecting all the dialogue clips and applying loudness normalization in the details panel to boost them. He also finds an unmuted track that is making one section louder and mutes it. After normalizing, he turns the selected dialogue down by 3 dB so the loudest peaks sit around -3, explaining that this leaves headroom so the export does not clip and distort. He then checks that music stays clearly underneath the dialogue, especially on headphones, noting music is almost always too loud when first added to a timeline. At the end, where the talking stops, he adds volume keyframes on the music track to raise it, trying around -5 to -6 and settling near -7.5 so it does not sound louder than the speech that preceded it. He closes by saying the general levels are now set, with only a few finishing touches left for the next lesson.

Key takeaways

• Use the audio meters to check dialogue levels before mixing, rather than judging loudness by ear alone.
• Loudness normalization can quickly boost quiet dialogue clips to a level suitable for YouTube.
• After normalizing, turn dialogue down about 3 dB so peaks stay below clipping and the exported audio does not distort.
• Keep background music low enough that dialogue remains effortless to hear, especially on headphones and different speakers.
• Use volume keyframes to raise music only after speech ends, and set that rise lower than it first seems to need.

Episode details: published January 7, 2026 · 5:15 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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