Make music sit under narration

Music under narration is the most common audio problem in a video, and the obvious fix is the wrong one. Turning the whole music track down works, and it costs the music all of its presence for as long as anyone is talking — the bed goes limp through the entire voiceover. But a voice does not need the whole spectrum. It needs the few bands it actually occupies. A carve takes only those out of the music, so the bed keeps its low end and its top: still music, while the voice stays intelligible.

​

When to use it

Whenever a music bed plays under speech. It is not a polish step to reach if there is time — place both tracks, carve, and listen. Skip it only when there is no narration for the music to sit under: a music video, a title card, a montage cut to the track.

​

Carve a bed

The carve is a module at the top of the music track’s rack, not a separate tool. Select the music clip, open its Audio FX section, and the module asks you to pick the voices this bed should make room for. A bed with exactly one candidate voice above it is already carved, at the default strength, because that is what a bed under narration wants. Several candidates leaves the picker waiting rather than guessing which one is the voice.

​

Set the strength

One control does the whole job. It derives how deep to cut, how many bands, how wide they are, how far the level may drop, and how far under the voice to aim — because those move together in any real mix. Switch the carve off keeps the settings and stops the carve, which is different from clearing it: a bed with one candidate voice would otherwise be carved again by default the moment it was re-evaluated.

​

What it writes

Ordinary effects. Open the rack after carving and you will find a few peaking filters and a gain stage — nothing hidden, nothing proprietary. Two things follow from that:

• The envelopes are editable. The carve always follows the speech, so every value becomes an automation lane you can adjust by hand afterwards. Silence leaves the music alone; a loud passage pushes the carve to full depth. There is no fixed-depth mode, because a fixed dip thins the bed through every pause.
• Re-carving is safe. The nodes a carve writes are tagged as its own, so running it again at a new strength replaces exactly those and leaves every effect and lane you built by hand where it was.

Inside a carved bed the signal runs through the dips first, then the level match, then anything you added yourself — which is why a limiter you place stays the last ceiling.

​

Point it at a group, not at clips

If narration arrives as several clips, group them and carve against the group. A carve pointed at individual clips has to list every one of them, and it stays right only until the next edit: add a fourth narration clip and it plays outside the carve’s awareness, so the music silently fails to duck under it. A carve pointed at a group resolves membership every time the analysis runs, so a clip added later is covered without touching the carve. Studio does this for you when you pick a second ungrouped voice — it creates a group behind them and points the carve at that instead.

​

What should happen

• The voice is legible without the bed sounding hollowed out.
• The music comes back up between phrases rather than staying flat.
• The bed keeps its bass and its top end. A carve that removed those would just be a filter.

​

Common problems

The music sounds notched or hollow. Strength is too high. Come back toward the default. This is the one failure mode with an obvious sound. The voice is still buried. A carve cannot fix a bed that is simply louder than the voice — spectral room does not solve a level problem. Compare the two tracks’ actual loudness first. Machine-generated speech commonly arrives far below a mastered music track, and that gap is arithmetic rather than taste. The bed starts out already ducked. A lane holds its first value backwards to the start of its clip. A bed that begins before the voice needs an explicit “no cut” point at its start. The music pumps. The level envelope releases slowly on purpose, because music that snaps back the instant a word ends sounds like a machine doing it. If it still pumps, the gaps between phrases are shorter than the release — lower the strength rather than fighting the envelope. Nothing was carved. The picker leaves itself alone when several tracks could be the voice. Name the voice explicitly.

​

Related topics

• Mix audio and apply effects
• Group tracks, mute, and solo
• Audio effects implementation