Music Bed

A bed sits behind speech for long stretches, mixed well below the voice so it registers without being listened to. Choose tracks with no vocals and no strong melodic hook, since anything memorable pulls attention off what is being said. Two mixing habits do most of the work: duck the music a few decibels whenever the voice comes in, and carve out the frequency range where speech lives so the two stop fighting for the same space. Beds also cover edits, hiding room-tone jumps between takes. Running one at the same level for twenty minutes flattens a video, so bring it up between sections and down under detail.