Volume
We’ve all been there—watching a great YouTube video, but the background music is so loud it drowns out the speaker. It’s frustrating, right? No matter how good the content is, if the sound isn’t balanced, it’s hard to stay focused. This is just one example of why sound design plays such an important role in making your content stand out online. And the good news? It’s not that hard to improve.
The Loudness Problem
Let’s start with one of the biggest issues: the loudness war. Everything online is getting louder—music, ads, even regular videos. There’s this belief that making things louder automatically makes them better. And while it’s true that our brains tend to like louder sounds (it’s a thing in neuroscience), it can get overwhelming quickly, especially for your audience. If your sound is constantly pushing at high volumes, it’s not just distracting—it can actually cause fatigue, especially when people are listening on headphones.
Think About Your Audience’s Ears
Speaking of headphones, more people than ever are consuming content through in-ear headphones. These little earbuds have their perks, but they can distort how audio is heard. They tend to push the high and mid frequencies (which is why vocals and certain sounds can feel sharper) while lacking definition in the lower mids and bass. Some brands try to compensate by adding booming bass, but it’s usually a bit messy and unfocused. This means your content might sound great on nice speakers but less so through everyday earbuds. That’s why controlling your audio dynamics—making sure there aren’t sudden jumps in volume or extreme highs and lows—can make a big difference. You want your audio to sound good no matter what someone is listening on.
Keep It Balanced
Another thing to think about is dynamic range—basically, how you manage the highs and lows of your sound. You don’t want your audience to feel like they need to adjust the volume every time the music swells or a new sound effect kicks in. It’s about keeping things smooth and balanced. If your background music is too loud or your voiceover is too quiet, it throws the whole experience off. This is especially important for those using in-ear headphones, where sudden loud noises can feel like pressure on the eardrum.
It’s Not Just About Being Loud, It’s About Being Clear
At the end of the day, great sound design isn’t just about making things loud—it’s about making them clear and easy to listen to. When your audio is balanced and your dynamics are under control, it makes the entire experience better for your audience. And the best part? You don’t need to be an audio engineer to make these improvements. Small tweaks can go a long way in ensuring your content sounds professional, no matter where or how it’s being heard.
By focusing on the basics, like controlling volume, balancing frequencies, and thinking about your audience’s listening environment, you can significantly up your sound design game—without getting bogged down in technical details. So, whether you’re just starting out or looking to fine-tune your videos, these little changes can have a huge impact.
Whether you realize it or not, if you’re a content creator, you’re already doing some form of sound design—consciously or just by instinctively using your ears. When you adjust the volume, choose music, or decide what sounds good, you’re making audio decisions. But here’s the tricky part: because you’re so familiar with your own content, it’s hard to listen to it with a fresh perspective.
Think of it like this: just as your brain can focus on specific things you see, it does the same with sound. For example, when you’re looking at something, your brain automatically fills in gaps and interprets details based on what it expects. A famous example is the video where people are passing a ball, and because you’re so focused on keeping track of the ball, you completely miss a person in a ridiculous gorilla suit walking through the frame. The point of that analogy is that, in the same way, your brain can “tune out” certain things in your own audio because you’re already familiar with what it’s supposed to sound like.
Now, think about when you’re adding music to a video. Your brain is already happy with how your voiceover sounds because you know what you’re saying—you’ve heard it a hundred times during editing. So, you might not notice if certain words are unclear or if the music is overpowering your speech. At this stage, you’re focused on the music, and without realizing it, you might crank up the volume because it feels more exciting in the moment. But that could end up making the voice hard to hear for someone listening for the first time.
This is where thinking like a conductor comes in. A conductor carefully balances an orchestra, making sure the violins don’t get drowned out by the horns when it’s their turn to shine. It sounds natural when done right, but it actually kind of isn’t. The perceived volume of the overall orchestra is one thing but within that the interplay of all the instrumt groups are changing depending on what the composition is trying to achieve artistically. In very rough terms we can refer to the manipulation of differnet volumes of different audio sources as gain staging. There’s of course much more too it but understanding the fundamentals of gain staging will do you a lot of good as a content creator. Now, don’t worry—making good audio for videos doesn’t have to be as complex as conducting an orchestra or being a mixing professional. But the key point here is to realize that, as a content creator, you’re already doing sound design. And by being aware of your own biases and learning a few simple techniques, you can make your audio sound much more professional.
So, as you go through the rest of this article, I hope it helps you take that next step toward improving your sound design!
The loudness war – file compression and audio compression
dBs and LUFS
Frequency response
A DAW
online tools audio processing tools – free and paid
file compression
meta data
Besides LUFS for the platform
Voice over effect
Level automation
Orchestration / understand frequency ranges
male voice is mostly 90 to 155 Hz, and female 165 to 255 Hz.. both are in the mids of our frequency resonse range. It doesn’t meant that it’s only there – if you only heard those ranges it would sound muffled, and a bit like a sine wave just pitching up and down quite randomly. The higher ends is definitely also there and plays a super important part. High end contains sibilance – you hear it in ‘S’-sounds and ‘F’-sounds and also when they are very transient sounds like ‘K’ and ‘C’ that can sound a bit “clicky” if taken out of context. For example, the words ‘clap’ and ‘kick’. Another thing to be aware of our plosives – easy to remember be the word plosives starts with the main plosive consonant in English – the ‘P’. When you pronounce a ‘P’ in a very articulated way you’re letting our more air than usual. To produce vowel sounds you don’t necessarily have to let out a lot of air through your moth – of course some air needs to pass the vocal chords in order to put them in to motion, but the air in front of your mouth needs to be oscillating – not moving. Those are very different things. Imagine the noise a fan makes in front of a microphone, or a weather reporter outside during a hurricane. That noise isn’t like the air is speaking with a defined resonance at a certain frequency – what humans do when they speak most of the time. Not it’s just pressing air which creates a lot of undefined noise. It’s genrally very undesirable in audio recordings – and the first thing you can do if you don’t already is to use a pop-filter for your voice recordings. But this is for a different blog post.
Full lossless WAV files are paid content. Rest assured you can still get the mp3 files for free of charge!
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