You want to get started with Undertone 2 and you want to do it quickly? You’ve come to the right place. If you’ve got the plugin, we’ve got everything you need to follow along. If you don’t have the plugin, you can see what your workflow will look like and how the plugin works.

What is Undertone?

It’s an audio plugin made by AudioKids that creates a bed of sound – usually a background ambience or ‘room tone’ sound – you can use to make edited dialogue or replaced dialogue sound more natural and well recorded.

Audio editors used to rely on cutting and splicing lots of samples into a bed of background noise. Undertone 2 helps you achieve better results with less effort.

Getting Started with Undertone 2 – Five Minute Tutorial

1. Load your DAW. Undertone 2 loads as a VST or Audio Units plugin in most major DAWs, or as an AAX plugin in Pro Tools. It also comes as an AudioSuite plugin for Pro Tools.

2. Load Undertone 2 onto a new track.

3. Drag your original voiceover into Undertone 2’s Slot 1. If you don’t have one of your own, use ours – download it here – and we have some new cuts you can splice in later.

4. Undertone 2 should automatically select only the unvoiced parts of the audio, and will derive an ambience to output based on that.

5. Press Play in your DAW and you should hear Undertone 2’s first attempt at extracting out only the bed of sound, based on the silences and gaps it has recognized.

The Original Sample that we loaded into Undertone 2 sounds like this…

The Sound Bed automatically generated by Undertone 2 with no tweaking sounds like this…

Changing Undertone’s Settings

Not every audio loaded into Undertone 2 will give you perfect results straight away, and you might want to make some changes to customize your ambience sound. Here’s how to get it done!

In the audio given above, things were good but not perfect. Some small slices of high-frequency ‘squeaks’ are present. The first way to try and get rid of these is by using the Sample Editor. Reduce the sizes of ambience selected, and play with the regions that are selected to see if you can make an impact.

Another simple way to change the sound is to weight differently between the two engines Undertone uses in Single mode. The granular (light blue controls) and convolution engine (white controls) both generate their own version of the room tone, and you can blend between these results with the mixer knob (highlighted below). 

You can also set filtering for each type. To fix our chirping problem, we remove the granular engine from high frequencies, and fill these frequencies in using only the convolution engine, as highlighted below. The sound is more true to the ambience behind the original recording.

Dialogue replacement made easy

Now that we have a bed of constant sound derived from the original, we can add newly recorded audio from a cleaner, studio environment and render some of Undertone 2’s output to put behind it, making it sound like it was recorded in the same environment.

Listen to the example below, where we’ve added some new replacement dialogue into our original recording. It sticks out like a sore thumb when the background noise cuts out.

With our sound bed from Undertone 2, made directly from the original recording, we can smooth out these gaps where the new recording plays, by adding the original ambience in below it. 

Can you notice how we achieved this new version of the dialogue sound using newly recorded audio and Undertone 2?

More on Undertone 2

Our software makes it easy to generate room tone and ambience from either dedicated room tone files or recorded dialogue with ambience behind it. Perfect for ADR and other dialogue editing duties, Undertone can save audio editors time and frustration in post production.

Take a closer look at Undertone here.