How to Create REACTIVE AUDIO Visualizers in Adobe After Effects 2020

 So this effect can beachieved with any type of sound file such as a voice highlight from yourpodcast or a musical track there are so many cool ways tocustomize the designstyle and movement of your audio spectrums and my hope is that you'll walkaway from this tutorial feeling more creative and confident about making yourown audio spectrum effectsso after the tutorial I'd love to see what you guyscreate please send your designs to me on instagram my handle is @premiere_gal and before we jump in I firstwant to thank Envato Elements for sponsoring this video I'll tell you more about them later onbut using my link below there's a special coupon that will get you 70%first you'll want toimport the avatar or logo you are using and the audio sample into After Effectsjust by dragging and dropping it into the project panel first click onthe newcomp icon since I'll be making this for my Instagram feed I recommend using a 4to 5 aspect ratio which is 800 by 1000 pixels if you're wondering whatpixelresolution to use for a specific platform I've put my recommendations inmy description box below the other important part here with the setup isthe comps duration you should make theduration as long as the audio clip thatyou're using so I'll enter the duration of my audio clip but after you make yourcomp you can always click on the hamburger.I want I think that looks great next let's drag our audio clipfrom the project panel into the compositionwe'll get to that in a bit next let's make abackground layer you cancertainly a place a video or a photo behind the avatar or a logo layer herein the comp but you can also make a color background I'mgoing to go tolayer new solid and choose a deep royal blue and then I'm going to add a coollighting change so let's go to effects and presets and searchfor then yetlighting and then double click to apply it and immediately you will then seethat there's this really cool clean vignette around the background whichlooks really awesome now ifyou already have a circular photoyou can skip this next step but if you need to make it circular for this effectsimply select the layer in the composition then goup to click on theshape icon here and select the ellipses shape tool and now you can click overthe photo here in drag holding shift to make a perfect circleI like to move itto the exact place simply by using the arrow keys on my keyboard so now thatthe image in the background is in place we need tobegin making our audio reacteffect the first step is to make a solid layer go to layer new solid and it canbe any color because the color will not bevisible anyway after we apply themask and the audio spectrum effect and now using the solid layer we're gonnadraw the shape of the mask in this case we're going todraw a larger circlearound the avatar but you can draw any shape that you want it can be a triangleor a star and that can be the path from whichyour audio visualization willanimate from so let's first reduce the opacity of this solid layer so we cansee the Avatar beneath it to do that hit T on your keyboardfor transparency andlet's drop it down so we can see the Avatar behind the solid and now with thesolid layer selected go back up to the ellipses tool and we'regoing to draw acircular mask again but this time just a bit bigger than the profiles edges andas we toggle down from the solid we're also going to want tochange the blendmode for the mask to none now it's time to apply the effect to our mask pathwe're going to go to effects and presets and we're going tosearch for audiospectrum you'll also see that there's an audiowaveform effect but spectrum has more customization options which is why Iprefer using it so double-click to apply the audio spectrumto the solid layerand now as we zoom in you can see there's a default pink line from here weneed to go to the effect controls first we need toselect an audio layer fromwhich the spectrum effect will play from so we're going to select the audiosample clip that we put in our composition and next we can changethepath to be the mask path that we just drew on the solid layer and now you cansee that the dots are in a circular path so now that thatis done now we're goingto adjust the frequency levels you want displayed now all audio tracks will bedifferent but since. we're working with voice it's fine to make it from around50 to 2000 Hertz you just want as much movement aspossible so you can definitely play around with these numbersuntil you getthe right movement in your line now we can further customize we can change thefrequency bands this is how many lines there are so you can play aroundwiththis value until you get the right number that you want for your look inthe next valuable parameter that is worth discussing is the maximum heightthis determines how high thesebars will go next is the thickness this is howthick these frequency lines will be so play around with it you don't want it tobe too thick or they willbleed too much together so if you want a thicker lookyou'll want to keep the frequency bands down and if you want more bands thenyou'll want to reduce the thicknessprobably closer to 2 again just playaround with it until you get the look that you like next is the softness so ifyou crank this up all the way toa hundred percent it'll make it more fuzzyand less definite lines but in this case I'll just leave the softness at zeronext for the colours you can make it anycombination that you want you can chooseboth a custom inside and outside color so the really cool part here is the hueinterpolation so if you're looking to create a rainbowspectrum this is whereyou make it happen if you increase this number the frequencies displayedactually rotate around the color spectrum space so the higher the numberthe more of the colorsthat you'll see and that if you wantmore colors you can just drag to the right to increase the hue interpolationdegree more and more and it will continue to showmore color and then thecolor spectrums begin to repeat as you see here in the composition so playaround with what colors you like but for me I'm going to changethe inside andoutside color to white and next is time to choose between what style or displayof the spectrum that you want the default here is the digital but ifyouwant to switch to analog you'll see as I scrub through it turns into this jaggedymoving the line which is pretty cool or you can choose dots which are justabunch of moving dots to the audio for this I'm going to keep it as a digitaldisplay next is the side option so if you choose side a it willanimateinwards towards the inside of the circle path and if it's B it'll go outside anda and B is on both sides so for this I'm just going to chooseB again you canchoose whatever combination you like but the reason I chose B here is I'mactually going to duplicate this solid and make another audio spectrum but onsite athis time so rather than creating it from scratch we're just going to godown to the composition hit command D on a Mac to duplicate it or control D onaPC now there's a duplicate here but first let's go ahead and rescale thisparticular spectrum down so hit s on your keyboard to bring up the scale andlet's rescale thisfirst ring to be inside of our first audio spectrum andnext all we need to do is change this to a different style to add some moredynamism I'm going tochoose analog but of course you could try out the dots tooand I'm going to make the side-on option a so now we have an outside audiospectrum on side Band on the inside we have an analog spectrum so I encourageyou to play around with the different looks and even make more duplicatecopies of the waveform to have somefun now the next step is optional but if youwant the avatar in the waveform to actually bounce and react to the musicthis is what I'm going to show younext so simply right-click on the audio fileand go to keyframe assistant and select convert audio to keyframesthis will create an audio amplitude layer now I'm going to toggle downunderthe effects here and since this is stereo we only need both channels so I'mjust going to delete the right and left channels now keeping this layer open weneed toselect the logo and the two solids together now that they're allselected by holding shift what we can do is right-click on all of them to precompose it to makeit one layer so now it's one layer and we can hit S on ourkeyboard to show the scale parameters and we can hold the option key on a Macorthe Alt key if you're on a PC and you can click on the stopwatch while you'reholding that key and this will activate expressions and now you're going to takethelittle swirly icon here click and drag it to pick with it to the sliderhere and what this did is it now connected the scale of this pre-compto the animationthat occurs in the audio amplitude and you'll see that thescale of the pre-comp needs to be fixed this is where we go in and simply editthe expression we needto add left bracket 100 comma 100 and right bracketand this will bring it back to its normal scale at a hundred percent andnow we have our final effect asfor the other types of advanced visualizers Iencourage you to explore all the different templates available in Envatoelements there's pretty much a template for anything you need so just simplydownloadthe template and you can customize it drop in your audio file andcustomize.