Premiere Pro · Audio
How to duck music under dialogue in Premiere Pro
Short answer
Tag the voice clips as Dialogue and the music as Music in Essential Sound. Select the music, tick Ducking, choose to duck against Dialogue, and click Generate Keyframes.
In Premiere Pro
01
Tag the clips
In Essential Sound, tag the voice clips as Dialogue and the music clip as Music.
02
Turn on Ducking
Select the music clip and tick Ducking in the Essential Sound panel.
03
Choose what to duck against
Click the Dialogue icon under Duck against.
04
Set the amount
Set Sensitivity, Reduce By (how many dB the music drops; -15 to -18 dB is a common start), and Fades (how quickly it moves).
05
Generate keyframes
Click Generate Keyframes. Premiere adds volume keyframes to the music. Drag them in the Timeline to fix any spot.
- If you change the edit, generate the keyframes again.
Eddie AI
Do it in Eddie
Eddie ducks music under speech by default.
When Eddie adds music, it sits about 12 dB under speech. Music arrives in the Premiere project on its own audio track, so you can adjust it there. You can also ask Eddie to snap the cuts to the beat.
Back to Premiere
Open the edit, click Export and choose Premiere. You get a Premiere project (.prproj) or the older Premiere XML. In the desktop app, Send to Premiere Pro builds the edit inside Premiere through Eddie's panel, which the app installs for you.
If you imported the footage through the desktop app, the timeline points at your original camera files, so Premiere relinks to them. If you uploaded on the web or pulled from cloud storage, it points at Eddie's proxy media; relink to those, not to the camera originals.
From the help center
Questions
- What does auto ducking do in Premiere Pro?
- It adds volume keyframes to music so it drops while someone speaks and rises in the gaps.
- Why didn't ducking work?
- The voice clips weren't tagged as Dialogue, or the music wasn't selected when you clicked Generate Keyframes.