In this Premiere Pro tutorial, you’ll find out how to end a song wherever you want using with reverb. Reverb is great when using royalty free music and helps make it work to its maximum potential for your video.

Here, you’ll learn how to prepare your audio clip to be able to ring out for multiple seconds. You’ll also use the reverb effect so that your audio comes to a natural and realistic conclusion. Now, jump into Premiere Pro and follow along to learn how to end a song wherever you want!

How To Add Reverb to a Song

Let’s say that you’ve got a song and you want to end it before the song naturally finishes on its own. There are a couple of different audio editing options that you have. One of these is splicing the true end in early on the same beat so that you can’t tell the difference.

But it’s very possible that you might not like the end to the song that you’ve got right out of the gate. If that’s the case, the next section will help you end your song at the exact spot that you want. Here’s a basic overview of how to going to accomplish this.

Step 1: Find the Beat

First, find the place that you want the song to end at. Set it up so that it can be extended with reverb, add the reverb effect, and dial it in. Then make sure the whole effect meshes together. To start this process, find the end of the music that you want.

Keep in mind that it’s so much easier to end a song naturally on the first beat of the song. What do we mean by that? Count the beats of the song like this:

1,2,3,4

1,2,3,4

1,2,3,4

1,2,3,4

And listen to see what you hear on the first “1”. That’s the music on the first beat. What’s next?

Step 2: Ending the Song

Take the part of the song that you want to end on and cut it to where the audio file ends. It might not sound right yet, but that’s okay. It doesn’t take much to make it start sounding correct.

Next, take the end of your file and start stretching it out. Do this until you get to just before the point that the next beat or noticeable part of the song starts to come in. Think about it like you’re going to take a small section of just a couple milliseconds and stretch it out to be very long. But you can only stretch what already exists, so ask yourself if you like the sound that exists at that given moment.

As soon as a part comes in that you don’t like, or that would take away from the ending, make sure to cut the audio file before that moment. With that done, take the point immediately after the downbeat, which you can usually see as the largest audio spike in that section, and make a cut there.

You should now have your main section of audio, and a small section cut out of that audio. Nothing should sound too different at this point, but now you’re going to take your clip and nest it. Right-click and go to Nest.

Step 3: Ending the Clip

Now you should have the clip sitting in its own sequence. In your main sequence, if you can see that your ending to the song can’t stretch out any longer, you can fix that by holding ALT or Option. Duplicate the clip to a new layer, disable it, and then stretch it out as long as you can.

It’s also recommended that you add a Fade Out here from the start, then volume down to zero when it finishes. It doesn’t have to be very long at all, but naturally fading out at this point will help to hide any harsh cut offs when you add the reverb.

Back in your main composition, you should see that this stretched out the nested sequence even longer.

Step 4: Add the Reverb Effect

Now it’s time to add the Reverb Effect which will now have lots of room to play with and reverberate out into your final composition.

Add the effect by searching in the Effects panel for the Studio Reverb Effect. Drag and drop it onto the nested sequence. Now you can start to make this effect come to life.

Right off the bat, you might not notice a whole lot is different, but we’ll go over the particular parameters and amounts to get you where you need to go.

Step 5: Editing the Reverb Controls

Click on your audio clip and go up to Effects Controls. Hit the edit button to go into your Reverb Controls. The main characteristic here that’s going to get you that reverb effect is called Decay. Your mileage may vary, but we like to set this to anywhere between 5500-6500.

Try 5500 to start and adjust as needed. Are you starting to like what it sounds like? Hopefully, it already feels like it’s the end of the song. But if you aren’t happy yet, there are still a few things you can do to make this effect reach its maximum potential.

Go to the sliders for Dry and Wet output levels. The simple explanation is that the more “wet” you make your sound, the more it’s going to reverberate out. Even though you might think that the max wet output would be best, it might not keep in the tone that you’re going for with your music.

For this Acoustic Indie Folk track in the Motion Array library, a dry output of 34 and a wet output of 26 seems to work pretty well. But play around with it and see what your song feels best at. It will change for each song.

Step 6: Add the Finishing Touches

Lastly, you’ll want to make your sound as full and as big as possible. With the default settings for Acoustic Indie Folk track above, the low could be getting cut out a bit (and the culprit might be the slider). You might find that the low-frequency cut is literally cutting out the low frequencies at this particular range. So the lower you drop it, the more of that deep bass sound you’re going to keep.

And with that done, make sure that you adjust your Room Size, Width Damping, and Diffusion levels until you like how it sounds. Finally, add a quick, constant Power Fade so that the end of the song fades into the Reverb effect. Just make sure that it’s really short so that it doesn’t bring the music back in during the following beat.

Adding reverb to a song doesn’t have to be difficult or impossible to achieve. Finding the beat, ending the song and clip, splashing the effect on, and editing into a complete experience starts with one step at a time. And that’s what tutorials are all about.

