Is It Necessary to Tweak the Sound of Royalty-free/Stock Music Tracks?

When you purchase royalty-free music to use as the introduction music for your podcast show, in almost all cases that music track has already been mastered, which means EQ’d, compressed and set to the standard LUFS loudness level.

Therefore, you may believe that you don’t have to do ANY additional processing to it.

Usually you don’t, but sometimes you do.

Of course you always have to adjust the overall volume of the music (via its channel fader) so that its loudness level is appropriate (not too loud, not too soft) in comparison to the peoples voices, but…

Typically the only processing you might want to apply to an already-mastered stock music track, if necessary, is an EQ to attenuate some high frequencies if the track sounds too bright (overly pronounced high frequencies, which is very common among stock music) or attenuate some low frequencies if there’s too much low end.

*And keep in mind that the only reason to tweak the sound of the music track using an EQ is so that the sound of the music blends in better with the sound of the voices.

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