3.3 Adding Music

Music and sound effects can really make a logo sting like this pop, but this project doesn't come with any music to work with. In this lesson, I'll show you were to find an appropriate music sting, and how to get it in your project. In the project folder, there is a Music.txt file, which has some text links to audiojungle.net, which is a good place to start looking for a little music sting that'll go with this logo. So this is audiojungle.net. This is this item right, here you can see ends in 034, right there, and I'll play that for you so you can hear what that sounds like. [MUSIC] So if you like this you can purchase it for $7, but if you don't you can search here other logo stings, and find something that I'm sure will work for your project. I've already purchased this, so I'm gonna import it into my project. I can just double-click in the Project panel right here, and on the Desktop I will navigate to that audio file, click Import, and there we go. Now it's in the project. So if I wanted to add that to this PM 01 comp I could. I'm just going to drag that right in here. It doesn't really matter what layer it goes on. In fact, I'm just going to click, and drag, and put it on the top, because there's no picture in it. If you look over here, there's a little toggle for the audio, but there's nothing for the video portion of this asset, because it doesn't have one, it's only audio. I'm just gonna make some more room in the timeline here. If I select this audio file, and I hit LL, you can actually see the wave form here, and all of these comps are actually a bit shorter than this audio file, so you can create a little fade here in After Effects. It's not perhaps the most sophisticated way to do it, but if you don't wanna mess around with another application to edit this audio, you can get it done right here. I'm going to move the CTI to the end of the project. You can also just hit End on the keyboard. Then I'm going to hit Alt+Shift+L on the keyboard, which is going to insert a keyframe, specifically an audio levels keyframe, and right now that keyframe is not doing anything. I could put a bunch more keyframes, but as long as they're all set to zero decibels it's not gonna change the level of this audio clip. What I wanna do is I wanna create a fade here, so I wanna pick a point in time, earlier than the end, of this. Let's say like here, and I want to add a keyframe, so I'm just going to click right here, add keyframe, and that's going to put another keyframe at zero decibels, and so between this keyframe and this keyframe, I want a fade. So all I need to do is come to this keyframe right here, and then pull this level down to something like -96. I'll press Enter, and you'll see that the wave form actually updated there. You can actually get negative numbers down to -192, but something like -60 might actually work just fine. If you go to -192, You'll see that this fade actually ends a good bit sooner than we need it to. So something like -60 might work, and again, this is not the most refined way to do an edit like this, but it does work. Lastly, you can click and drag, and make a selection of these two keyframes, and then on your keyboard press F9. What that's gonna do is change those from that diamond shape, which is a linear keyframe, and changes it to this hourglass shape, which is a bezier keyframe. Hitting F9 on the keyboard actually does an easy ease keyframe, which means it eases out of the first keyframe, and eases into the second key frame, and sort of makes for a more smooth transition. Which is going to be a little bit smoother than that linear keyframe, which is just gonna start moving at a constant rate of speed at this point until it gets to this next keyframe. Again, you don't have to understand exactly what that does, but just check out what the wave form looks like and then I'll undo that. Kind of hard to see, because, there we go. Let may redo that. Yeah, okay, so it's kinda subtle. If I undo that you can see that the wave form is gonna fade out here. It's gonna lose a little less energy right here. If I redo that change, Ctrl+Shift+Z, then it's gonna maintain a little bit more energy here in the fade and then it's gonna come to drop off here. It's a little bit smoother. Again, After Effects is not what you wanna be using for audio edits, but for something this simple, you can make it work. Without fading that out, if I just delete all the keyframes by clicking this stopwatch, you can see that when it gets to the end, there's still gonna be audio there, and it's gonna sound kind of clunky. Let me just play it from here. [MUSIC] It automatically loops. I'm gonna make it not do that. If I go to the preview panel right here, I can just click that once and that will set it to not loop. And so now if I play from this point by hitting space bar. [SOUND] [SOUND] You can hear the audio just drops. If I undo that last change, it's gonna put my keyframes back. So now when I preview it, I'm gonna get this nice fade. [MUSIC] All right, things sound smoother. We can even move this one back a little bit and then change this from this bezier keyframe here by hold Control, and then click it, it'll change it to a linear keyframe. That might make it even smoother. [MUSIC] Yeah, I think that would work. And so that's pretty much it. What I did there was I added audio to this PM 01 comp, but that PM 01 comp is used in this PM 01 cameras comp. So now if you look down at the bottom you'll see that this layer now has an audio toggle, because this has audio in it. Now one thing you could do, to give you some more options down the road, is in your PM 01 comp here, select your music track, right-click and choose Pre-compose. I’m gonna name it to Music, and then I’m gonna choose move all attributes into the new composition, and then click OK. So what that's going to do, if I double-click on this music comp, is now I have my audio clip here. If I hit U on the keyboard, I still have that nice fade, which is going to work really nice for this PM 01 and PM 01 cameras. But now if I wanna add that same music clip to PM 02, without having to go through all those steps, I can just pull in this one music comp here. That music track is now going to work for this comp as well. Do the same thing for PM 03, just drag this right in here, and if I play this, [MUSIC] You can hear that the music is working just fine. The benefit of this is, if you wanted to change the music, you could just go back to your music comp and replace this music with a different track. And that would update in all of these other comps, because they're all referencing this comp right here music, and inside of here is this audio clip right here. So it gives you a little bit more flexibility down the road. All right, now your project is looking really nice, it's sounding great. The next step is to render this out, so that you can use it in video application, or just post it on the web, and that's what you're gonna learn in the next lesson.