0542 – Your Mic Levels Mixed With Music

2022.06.26 – 0542 – Your Mic Levels Mixed With Music

Your levels with music

We looked at the use of music beds before, but the important thing to remember here is the balance of levels between the music and your voice.

Many beginners tend to have background music too high because they aren’t sure of their voices and their overall confidence, and so use the bed to cover them a bit. It’s a bit of a safety net. This is a mistake and should be avoided.

Invariably, your voice must be the dominant sound without you having to shout over the backing track. Again, if you do this, your voice may appear aggressive to the listener and the way your message is received will be altered.

The trouble is you can’t really use the VU meters to judge whether the music is too high against the voice, because you often have two sounds going through the audio board only one set of meters – showing the overall mixed level. Therefore, you need to use your ears, experience and careful judgment to create a good balance between two sounds when you’re mixing them.

Equally of course, the background can’t be too low or you’ll lose the effect of having it there in the first place! (See more on this below: ‘ducking’.)

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