How to sound design commercials like $100K broadcast pros

How do professional editors sound design commercials?

Professional editors start with an emotional target, then build background ambiance before adding dialogue, specific sound effects, and finally music. This systematic approach creates the cinematic sound quality found in $100K broadcast commercials.

The secret is treating sound design with equal importance to picture editing, using a proven framework rather than adding sounds randomly.

Stop diving in without a plan

Editors make a big mistake — they dive right into a scene and start using various techniques without a clear goal in mind. That was me during my first few years as an editor. It wasn't until my first mentor showed me that editing is all about emotion and story that my editing changed and it kicked off my career.

The first thing you need to do is decide on a target emotion for your scene. Then use all of your editing skills and technique to reinforce that emotion.

Take Oppenheimer, for example. When you watch the interrogation scene, editor Jennifer Lame was targeting pure tension. The techniques matter, but only because of what they make us feel.

The 4-step sound design framework

After 20 years of editing broadcast TV commercials, I created a four-step sound design system I now use on commercials with budgets of $100,000 and higher.

Step 1: Build background ambiance

Once I got serious about sound design, I realized it was at least equal importance as picture. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that sound is actually more important than picture.

I started asking myself this simple question every time I brought a new shot into my timeline: what is the sound of the shot?

Usually, it starts with the background ambiance. Even if your clip comes with audio attached, it's rarely what you need to make your video come alive. Before I touch anything else, I want my shots to live in a believable soundscape.

Don't settle for what's already in your timeline. Try a few different background sounds and pick the one that pushes your scene toward the emotional target you picked in step one.

Step 2: Edit dialogue and add room tone

I don't start with dialogue because I like to give my dialogue or voiceover a bit of context of the world it's living in, and building out that ambiance really helps with that.

Once I start cutting my dialogue, I'm basically trimming out any unwanted noises between words or phrases. But every time I make a cut, I'm left with a silent gap. Fill those with room tone.

Instead of letting your dialogue or voiceover editing fall to silence, use room tone to fill those spaces so the edits aren't noticeable.

Feel free to push and pull the placement of the dialogue, especially if it's not shown on screen. Need more energy? Tighten it up. Need more introspection? Add space.

Step 3: Add specific sound effects

In step one, we asked "What is the sound of the shot?" to help us build out the background ambiance. Now let's ask that same question to help us find specific sound effects that can bring each moment to life.

Don't settle for sound captured on set. Ask yourself: what specific sounds can I add to amplify the emotional target?

Go through clip by clip in your next edit and ask yourself: is there a sound I could add or swap out to elevate my target emotion? Even if a sound was recorded on set — like a door knock — it might not hit the emotional target you're going for.

Each of these sounds on its own may not seem very important, but together they really add up and bring this scene to life.

Step 4: Add music that evokes your target emotion

I like to build the emotional base with ambiance and dialogue first, since music is so powerful when it comes to emotion. I find that if I start with it in my timeline, it can sometimes trick me into thinking I've hit all my emotional targets when really I haven't done everything I can yet.

The key to finding the perfect music track is always to start with an emotional target in mind. What do you want the audience to feel in this moment?

If you'd started with big, booming music, it might have overwhelmed everything else, and you might have gotten lazy and not built out the other sounds that really make it all work.

How to find the perfect sound effects

Why does it feel like you can't find the sound effect you need, even when you're typing exactly what you're imagining? The most popular sound libraries came from hard drives or CDs and they were meticulously organized, but not necessarily for modern searches.

They relied on categories with names like footsteps, doors, cars, impacts, and animals. The naming wasn't about creativity — it was about functionality.

Think like classic sound libraries

Instead of describing the scene as you see it, use basic universal terms. Start broad and then refine from there. For example, instead of starting with something like "building explosion," just start with "explosion" and see what comes back.

When you want to refine a broad search term, try adding a simple adjective. Here are some to try: big or small, soft or hard, medium or large, fast or slow.

Think in layers

I needed the sound of a metal spike coming up from the ground, sort of like a booby trap. I first searched for the word "spike," but the sounds that came up weren't even close.

Then I remembered sound designers don't just use literal sounds — they build composites from multiple sounds. So I changed how I was thinking about the sound and I broke it up into two parts.

I searched for "metal fast" and found exactly what was in my head for that part of the sound. Then I searched for "impact heavy," and when I combined both of those into my sequence, it was exactly the sound I was imagining.

If you can't find the exact sound you're looking for, break it up into two components and search for them separately. This is often how sound designers approach their craft.

Download my free Sound Effects Search Term Guide — it lists major categories and common search terms to help inspire you when you're feeling stuck.

Professional sound design workflow in action

When I'm working on the sound for a commercial, I like to start with background ambiance. That way my dialog has a nice bed to sit in.

For some projects, you might find one bit of ambiance that works great for the whole spot, and you only need one audio file. But in general, I find it best to layer multiple ambiance to give a more realistic feel.

Use multiple ambience layers

Take a desert camping scene I worked on. I used four different ambience layers:

• Binaural Desert at Dawn for the overall desert feel
• Fire crackling sound for the campfire
• Cicadas and crickets for the night outdoor scene
• Wolf howling to set the desert stage

Each layer serves a specific purpose in building the complete soundscape.

Create two versions simultaneously

Instead of just creating one version of the sound design, I like to create two at the same time. As I search for sounds, I can create two distinct versions that I can either combine at the end — kind of the best of both versions — or I can send two distinct versions to my collaborator and get their feedback.

This gives us more freedom to experiment and gets the creative conversation flowing if you're working with others.

Layer specific sound effects strategically

Throughout campaigns where I'm dealing with 3D animated characters, I want to bring those characters to life with specific sounds. For animated dollar bills, I used subtle paper sounds throughout the commercial.

These little details really bring spots to life. Go through clip by clip and ask yourself what specific sounds you can add that support your emotional target.

Turn on sub-frame editing

When you're an editor getting into sound design, figure out how to turn on sub-frame editing. In Premiere, I have a hotkey for that.

Instead of moving your sound effects one frame at a time to line them up, you can actually be very exact with your placement. That works especially well on impacts where you want them right on the frame.

These little changes really add up and make the difference between amateur and professional sound design.

The difference between sound design and sound mixing

My role as sound designer on a project is to find all the right sounds to bring a story to life. I transfer all the sounds in the form of an AAF file and a QuickTime reference movie to the sound mixer.

The sound mixer brings it into ProTools and performs the final mix. That includes fine-tuning all of the audio levels, effects like equalization and compression, especially on dialog, special effects like echoes and reverbs, panning sounds in the stereo field, and final broadcast leveling so spots pass quality control before they air on television.

There's definitely some overlap. As a sound designer, I'm obviously doing some pre-mixing, especially when it comes to leveling because I don't want anything to be so out of whack that it's distracting.

Why sound design levels up your career faster than anything else

After 20 years of editing broadcast TV commercials, there's one thing that leveled up my career faster than anything else: sound design.

Music can lull us into thinking our sound design is good enough when it's really not. Delete the music in your cut so you can really hear what's missing in your soundtrack.

If you really want to elevate your scene, you need to find background ambiance that really elevates that emotional target. Don't settle for what's already in your timeline.

The fastest way to level up as a video editor is to level up as a sound designer. Spend as much time on sound as you do on picture.

Work with me to create emotionally-impactful edits that win serious clients with real budgets in my professional editing program.