How to Automatically Fade Music in and out in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2018)

Ducking is when the music volume automatically dips down whenever someone starts speaking, then comes back up when they stop. You hear it in every podcast, YouTube video, and broadcast. It keeps the music present as a bed without competing with the dialogue. Doing this manually means placing dozens of volume keyframes, which is tedious and time-consuming.

Premiere Pro has an auto-ducking feature in the Essential Sound panel that does this automatically. You tag your audio tracks, set a few parameters, and Premiere generates all the keyframes for you. Today we go over how to set it up.

How to Auto-Duck Music in Premiere Pro

Tagging Your Audio

1. Create a sequence with both your voice/dialogue and your music on the timeline.
2. Open the Essential Sound panel. Go to Window > Essential Sound if it is not visible.
3. Click on your voice audio clip in the timeline.
4. In the Essential Sound panel, click the Dialogue button. This tags the audio as spoken word.
5. Now click on your music clip in the timeline.
6. In the Essential Sound panel, click the Music button. This tags it as a music track.

Configuring the Ducking

7. With the music clip still selected, look in the Essential Sound panel for the Ducking section. Check the checkbox to enable it.
8. Click the bar to expand the ducking controls. You will see three settings:
   • Duck Against: This should be set to Dialogue (which is why we tagged the voice track as Dialogue in step 4).
   • Sensitivity: This controls how loud the voice needs to be before the music ducks. Higher sensitivity means it reacts to quieter speech. Start in the middle and adjust if it is ducking too aggressively or not enough.
   • Reduce By: This controls how many dB the music drops when ducking. -10 to -15 dB is a good range. Too little and the voice still competes. Too much and the music disappears entirely.
   • Fades: This controls how quickly the music ramps down and back up. Shorter fades are good for fast-paced content. Longer fades sound smoother and more natural for slower-paced content.

Generating the Keyframes

9. Click the Generate Keyframes button at the bottom of the ducking section.
10. Premiere Pro will analyze the dialogue track and automatically place volume keyframes on the music track. The music will dip down during speech and come back up during pauses.
11. Click on the music clip and look at the volume line on the timeline. You will see all the generated keyframes.
12. If any of the keyframes need adjustment, you can manually drag them up or down.
13. If you change the ducking settings, just click Generate Keyframes again to recalculate.

Tips

• Set up your loop first. Use In (I) and Out (O) points to create a loop over a section with both voice and music. Toggle the loop button on in the timeline controls. This lets you hear the ducking in real time while you fine tune the settings.
• You can have multiple dialogue tracks. If you have two speakers on different tracks, tag them both as Dialogue. The music will duck for either one.
• For manual volume control without auto-ducking, check out how to fade music in and out using keyframes.
• For mixing voice and music using EQ instead of volume, check out how to make voice and music sound good together.

That is how you automatically fade music in and out in Premiere Pro. The Essential Sound panel makes what used to be a tedious manual process into something that takes about 30 seconds to set up.