
Sweetening sound with audio effects: Lesson 12-1
For most projects you will probably be happy to use audio in its original, unaltered state. But at some point you might want to apply effects to it. If you use music from old cassette tapes, you can use the Lesson 12 Intro video, then move on to this mini-lesson.
1. | Open Premiere Pro to the Lesson 12 project. |
2. | Drag Ad Cliches 12 Mono.wav to the Audio 1 track (it's a mono track) of the Lesson 12 Practice sequence.Feel free to play this little ditty. |
3. | Open the Audio Effects > Mono folder.There are 19 Mono audio effects. |
NoteAll the Mono effects have the Mono single-speaker icon (




NoteI won't explain or list all the attributes of all the audio effects. To learn more about audio effect parameters, select Help > Adobe Premiere Pro Help, open the Adobe Help Center Contents tab, and open Effects: Reference > Audio Effects. You'll see a list of all the audio effects.
7. | Play the clip and move the sliders to experiment with the effect.Lower values are more palatable, even with this over-the-top audio clip. |
NoteFormant Preserve is not a misprint. Formant is the character, resonance, and phonetic quality of a particular voice. Formant Preserve attempts to retain those elements even with severe pitch changes. Unlike Bypass, which uses a checkbox connected to its keyframe feature, Formant Preserve's checkbox keyframe is connected to a slider. That can lead to an inaccurate placement of the moment when you switch Formant Preserve on or off. To help remedy that, move the slider only far enough to go from on to off or vice versa rather than using the checkbox.
11. | Delete Ad Cliches from the sequence and replace it with Music 12 Mono (you can do that by dragging Music 12 Mono to the beginning of the sequence, on top of Ad Cliches, to do an Overlay edit). |
NoteThe three Music 12 audio clips were all made using Audition 2.0 loops. I'll demonstrate that process later in this lesson.
12. | Drag Treble to that clip and increase its parameter.This guitar clip lends itself to a treble boost. |
NoteTreble is not simply Bass in reverse. Treble increases or decreases higher frequencies (4,000 Hz and above) while Bass changes low frequencies (200 Hz and less). The human audible frequency range is roughly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Apply both Bass and Treble to a clip and switch between them by clicking their Toggle Effect On or Off buttons (

A treasure trove of VST plug-ins
![]() | Reverb's rack of control knobs is a signal that this is a |