10 Top Audio Editing Tutorials Every Video Editor Should Watch

Ramp up your efficiency with our favorite tutorials on the fundamentals of recording, editing, and correcting audio files. All for video editors and filmmakers.

Audio can make or break your project. When it’s good, your audience experiences complete immersion in your story. When it’s bad, you lose their attention almost instantly. This isn’t new information. But it’s always worth revisiting, since audio is such a crucial part of the storytelling process.

With your sound success in mind, we collected all of our favorite audio tutorials in one place. If you’re just starting out, watching these tutorials is a smart step toward mastering the basic fundamentals of good audio recording and editing. If you’re more experienced, well, this is the perfect opportunity for a quick refresher, yeah?

Of course, one of the toughest steps in the video editing process is finding and committing to a particular song or score for your project. As mentioned above, this music is going to make an impact on the audience’s experience, so picking the “right” songs is  important, and you don’t want to blow your budget on something you end up wanting to change.

In this situation, PremiumBeat’s just-launched music subscription can help. A subscription gives video editors five song downloads a month, with each track (plus shorts, stems, and loops) priced at just $12.99 each. To get started, spend a few minutes exploring our stacked music library and find your first five downloads.

1. Recording Audio as a Solo Filmmaker

Before we dive into the post-production, it’s important to lay out some of the fundamental steps to ensuring you have good, clean files to work with in the first place. You might find yourself being sent MP3 or WAV files from production, or you might be recording audio during the shoot on top of editing it all together afterward. Lewis McGregor breaks down how to choose your recorder, mixer, and boom pole. As an experienced solo shooter, Lewis knows exactly how to efficiently capture the best audio with extremely limited resources.

2. Understanding the Basics in Premiere Pro

This tutorial from Adobe is a straightforward look at how to handle audio clips on your Premiere Pro timeline. The video covers using the pen tool, track keyframes, volume, and gain. These adjustments and tweaks are simple, yet essential, for editing video effectively. Your video must be mixed well — striking a balance between what we see and what we hear — or your video will be unwatchable.

3. Editing Audio in DaVinci Resolve

Editing audio in DaVinci Resolve is so much easier than you might initially think. If you watch any tutorials about it, you’ll see the workflow entails using the Fairlight section of Resolve. This is just where you’ll access the audio editing feature. This video is perfect for anybody new to the software or for anyone switching from Premiere or FCPX. It acts as an amazing guide to what to expect, and it explains how to find some of the tools you’re already familiar with from other programs.

4. Editing Audio in Final Cut Pro X

Understanding levels is something that takes years of video editing experience to master. In this video from Chadwin Smith, we look at the basics of working with and correcting audio within Final Cut Pro X. The video dips a little into editing theory with how you want your levels to flow with dialogue and music. This is necessary for understanding how audio serves the video on your timeline, creating a complete professional final product.

5. EQ Masterclass

The microphone company Deity takes us through a deliciously in-depth tutorial on understanding the ins and outs of working with EQ. This tutorial breaks down what to expect when opening or applying a Parametric EQ effect to your audio clips.

Whether it’s dealing with high frequencies (loss of clarity) or editing pitches and tones of inconsistent vocals, this tutorial is essential for any editor — if only because you’re inevitably going to be given terrible audio files and asked to perform a miracle. On top of fixing problems, the tutorial covers creating and applying effects for voices and sounds as well.

The tutorial uses Premiere, but the ideas and explanations can be applied to FCPX and Resolve. You’ll find EQ effects in every NLE, for the most part.

6. Make Your Audio Sound Incredible in Premiere Pro

Acting as a second part to his original video on recording audio and gear recommendations, Matt Johnson walks us through his mixing process for editing videos. Even though this tutorial is for a wedding video, it’s still recorded dialogue that needs to sound clear.

With the example he’s working with, the dialogue is inconsistent in volume and overall quality, so he details how using the Multiband Compressor plugin can help turn things around. After walking you through how to set this effect, he then shows you how to save this as a preset for you to use later.

7. Clean up Noisy Audio in Under Thirty Seconds

In this rapid-fire video from Shutterstock Tutorials, we look at how to reduce noise in Premiere and Audition in just three easy steps.

First, right-click on your clip and hit Edit Clip in Adobe Audition. Basically, you just find a section on your clip with no dialogue, highlight it, hit Effects>Noise Reduction/Restoration>Capture Noise Print, click out anywhere on the timeline, then go back to Effect>Noise Reduction/Restoration>Noise Reduction (process), then hit Apply. You’ll see the whole clip highlighted, so hit Command>S. This will place it back into Premiere as the corrected clip. If you’re interested in reducing noisy video, Shutterstock Tutorials can help with that too!

8. DIY Sound Effects at Home

This tutorial is a master class in how to pick up quick sounds and sound effects right inside your home — and all you really need is your phone. Why is this perfect for video editors? Well, if you’re editing audio, it’s likely you’re not going to have enough audio clips to work with. Plus, you could always use more depth when it comes to sounds, right?

9. Recording Dialogue: Mono vs. Stereo

Understanding how audio is recorded can do wonders for your understanding of editing audio files. Presented as a Q & A, this video covers almost everything you could want to know about working with and correcting audio files, as well as the basics of microphone patterns. This general understanding of solid production practices can help improve communication between video editors and production, since it creates a common language with the crew members running audio.

10. Tips for Getting Better Audio on Set and in Your Edit

Anthony, from PremiumBeat, is back at it again, breaking down the fundamentals of audio transitions, soundscapes, and how to fill empty space within your edit. You might find yourself stuck with empty space in your scenes. Maybe it doesn’t quite fit to start a new song, cut to a new scene, or to even end a scene. So, Anthony goes over what you can do with what you have, as well as how to use audio to add depth and rhythm to the pacing of your edit.

Like any step in editing, choosing the music that will play over or under your footage can be challenging. Remember, PremiumBeat’s new music subscription can remedy this song-choice struggle by allowing you to download multiple tracks to test out with clients (without breaking the budget). Check out our impressive music library, find some tracks that inspire your creativity, and start your subscription.

Ultimately, audio editing is intimidating. Heck, recording audio or working with it in any form is intimidating. But, like any part of video production, the first step toward mastering it is simply doing it.

Start by recording one file, then another, and then another until you’re comfortable with working with microphones, recorders, and handling files of any kind in your editing software. It’s all about practice!

Cover image via edwardolive.