If you’re a YouTube Creator, you understand the importance of making all videos you create look as professional as possible. Having videos that not only look professional but feel professional is incredibly important if you want to build an audience. Sure, it can be easy to reach your target audience by creating content relevant to their interests, but by making your videos professional and accessible you’ll make sure that you’re also attracting those who aren’t already familiar with the subjects you’re talking about.
Oftentimes the things that make a video go from amateur to professional are things we don’t notice. For example, a lot of YouTube creators use lighting as a means of getting a “normal” camera angle. However, many people don’t realize how much lighting is required to make something look “normal”. The same can be said for make-up and scenery. Though we want to believe that YouTube is a platform full of people simply shooting personal videos in their bedrooms, there are many layers of manufactured authenticity required to create the professional-looking productions that we’ve grown to love.
An aspect of making YouTube videos that you might not often consider is background music. However, adding background music to your YouTube videos is an essential part of being a content creator.
To help you understand just how important background music for YouTube videos is, we’ve created a guide to the concept and how to effectively use music in the videos that you make.
Why Background Music is Important
Having background music in your video is important if you want to convincingly capture the tone. This is the part of making videos that many people underestimate. However, using music in videos is important even in genres where you might not think that background music is essential.
For example, many people who make vlogs might not think background music is necessary, as the natural sounds of the area being filmed should provide a sufficient soundtrack. If you’re speaking during the shot footage, this analysis makes sense. However, if you’re showing a montage of activities that happened in a certain area, you can’t go wrong with having some type of background music to go along with it. This not only helps keep the footage interesting but helps eliminate any background noise that might not sound appealing. These types of montages are great opportunities for creators to add fast-paced indie music to accurately match the pace of the video.
How to Implement Background Music
Implementing background music is not often as easy as simply putting the track in the background. It is important to make sure that the audio actually fits with the main track for the video so it can truly fit the role of “background music”. Despite this sounding complicated, you don’t need to be an audio engineer to mix in background music well enough.
An easy way that you can mix in background music effectively is to understand what panning is. You see, when you create a mix, the sound does not usually come from one place. This is the difference between mono and stereo, with mono having all sounds only come out from one speaker and stereo giving producers the opportunity to have sound coming from multiple places. This is also why music sounds different in headphones than it does on your computer speakers, as you can experience the idea of space better with headphones on and hear which sounds are on the left and right of the mix.
Panning is a term to refer to where a recording sits in the mix. So, if you were to pan a track to the left, this means that the track will be on the left side of your headphones. When adding background music to a video, it’s important to make sure that the music track itself is panned a bit out of the way. If you don’t do this, it has the potential to clash with the main audio track, making it more difficult for the listener to hear the music and the audio. We recommend that you continue to experiment with this and embrace the trial and error until you have something that you’re comfortable with!
Types of Music to Use
There are a variety of genres that match different types of videos, but in general, we recommend that you always choose music that matches the tone of the video. If you need some calm options, though, we recommend playing anything from the classical, new age or ambient genres. These are all great options that have a wide variety of instrumentation to choose from depending on your personal preference! If you’re somebody who is more interested in intense music, you should look into having punk or rock music in the background.