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Easy Tips for Adding Audio to Your YouTube Videos

Why Add Audio to Your YouTube Videos


According to Business Insider, 96% of users watch YouTube videos with sound. So, if you’re not adding audio to your YouTube videos, you’re already behind the curve. Sound has been proven again and again to engage audiences and elevate content to the next level.


Think of your favorite film score, song, or piece of music. Why do you love it? How does it make you feel? (Alternatively, imagine The Mummy trailer with Tom Cruise that was released without the sound added…)


Audio is a shortcut to making audiences feel big emotions when engaging with content–that is, when it’s done right. When audio matches the tone and mood of the video, evolving with each cut and story beat at the same time, you increase the emotional connection between your audience and your video.


There are different types of audio that you can add to your YouTube videos, as we’ll discuss below. On the other side of things, bad audio can definitely ruin a perfectly good video. People are willing to put up with bad camera work to a certain extent, but people literally tune out bad audio immediately. All this to say, it’s very important to make good use of audio when making a YouTube video.


And adding audio to a YouTube video doesn’t have to mean a sweeping original score. A few well-placed, high-quality sound effects can also get the job done. It might be a door closing, a bird tweeting, or a rushing waterfall, or it might be a more abstract sound to accentuate certain beats of your video–a “lightbulb going off” sound effect when a character gets an idea or a drumroll to create anticipation in your audience.


If you carefully choose your audio and edit it well, you can take your video from average to professional grade pretty quickly. MatchTune’s Studio is an easy and convenient way to add audio to your videos without needing a professional editing suite. We’ll go into more detail below.


The Different Types of Audio You Can Add to Your Videos


There are several ways you can add audio to a YouTube video. We’ll do a brief introduction to each type of audio and how you might use it to enhance your video.


Music - this could be music you yourself have written or prerecorded music from bands, orchestras, or singers. Any pre-recorded music that you include is called a soundtrack. A score, on the other hand, is music written specifically for the video you have made. Your score could be instrumental or have vocals, and it could be a remix of previously written music too.

Sound effects – You may want to add a Pop! Bang! or Whoosh to your video to emphasize certain beats. You could use a sound effects library to find the ones you’re looking for or even record your own.


Voiceover – If you need to tell your story in a more explicit way via narration, you can add a voiceover, or prerecorded text layered over your video. This voiceover, whether the speaker is you or someone else you’ve asked to record, can help tell the story of your video by explaining complicated concepts or by giving context for whatever is happening on-screen.


Examples of Great Audio-Enhanced YouTube Videos


Here are just a few examples of some great audio-enhanced YouTube videos:


Henri the Cat went viral for his very French, very philosophical outlook on life. The music combined with the voiceover in French creates hilarity out of what would otherwise be just another cat video.


In 2006, the band Sick Puppies created a music video called “Free Hugs Campaign” in which someone walked around the city with a “Free Hugs” sign and allowed anyone who wanted to hug him to do so. In this case, the song goes perfectly with the video because it was written for this specific campaign. And although the images are powerful by themselves, can you imagine watching them in silence?


Christian the Lion was another viral video that made the rounds in the early 2000s. Two British men raised a motherless lion cub in their home in England, then they released him into the wild when he was old enough. A year later, they came to visit him with unexpected results. And the video absolutely would not have the same impact without a little Whitney Houston to go with.


There are plenty of other YouTube videos out there with great audio elements that help tell the story. Will your video be the next to go viral?


How to Add Audio to Your Videos Using MatchTune


In the old days, it could take days or even weeks to find the perfect song for your video. But Studio’s Artificial Intelligence has made that problem irrelevant. Studio has the power to analyze your video, cull potential tracks from thousands of options, automatically edit the track to the appropriate length, and sync the music with any cuts. Then you can review the edits Studio has made and make any necessary adjustments. To learn more about Studio’s video-sync feature, click here.


Studio has a feature called Smart Music Search. It analyzes your video and identifies the type of content, from sports, art, science and tech, or kids, to name a few. Then Smart Music Search combs the entire Studio music catalog to find several different kinds of tracks that would work best for your video.


MatchTune partners with leading production music companies, so Studio always has the latest and greatest tracks for you to choose from. Smart Music Search will provide you with five options. If none of them are right for your video, you can click “Give me more” and Studio will generate five different tracks for you to choose from.


You can apply Smart filters to Smart Music Search to refine the kinds of results you’re getting. Simply click the “video style” tab in the upper right corner to change the video style and subsequently your Smart Music Search results. Click “apply these criteria” and see what happens.


If you’re still not satisfied with the results, you can select the “music style tab” and state your preferences for music purposes, genre, and mood. This will get you much closer to the style of music you’re looking to add to your video. Studio will automatically edit the track to be the same length as your video. Watch this video for more tips on using Smart Music Search.


We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post about adding audio to YouTube videos. For more inspiration and production tips, discover more about MatchTune here, and try MatchTune for yourself today. Download it now to get started!


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