How to Make Your Own TikTok Sound (and Upload it Too!)

Tips and tutorials to make your next viral TikTok sound.

by
George Mathew
How to Make Your Own TikTok Sound (and Upload it Too!)

TikTok sounds are the key ingredient of the TikTok experience. Today we’re teaching you how you can easily make your own TikTok sounds, all the different ways you can go about it, and some fun facts about just how important audio is to the rise of TikTok.

Table of Contents

  1. Stats About Audio’s Contribution to The Rise of TikTok
  2. How to Add Your Own TikTok Sound
  3. How to Do a Voiceover on TikTok
  4. How to add your own music or audio to your TikTok video
  5. 7 Key Ingredients on how to make a viral TikTok sound
  6. Case Study: What Happens When You Create A TikTok Challenge?

Stats About Audio’s Contribution to The Rise of TikTok

The fundamental aspect of TikTok is that it helps drive higher engagement rates. To understand just how big audio is to the platform, TikTok partnered with Kantar – the world’s leading data, insights, and consulting company – to reveal some interesting facts:

  • 88% of TikTok users say that sound is essential to their TikTok experience
  • 73% of users say that they stop and pay attention to ads on TikTok that come with audio
  • TikTok is the only social media channel where audio raises purchase intent and brand favorability
TikTok sound on study

Be it any other platform, I would have recommended adding captions and using other ways to generate interest in your video. On TikTok, that’s way less effective.

Audio rules the roost here.

According to the research led by TikTok, users are more receptive to sound within the ads than they’re on other platforms.

Users say that the sound they experience on TikTok is fun at a 66% higher rate compared to other similar platforms.

According to TikTok, sound is anti-scroll and helps audiences hear and feel what you’re saying.

In order to capitalize on this, here’s what brands must do on TikTok:

  • License popular audio -TikTok places many restrictions on the sounds brands can pick and use from within the app. But brands are free to create licensing agreements for audio from independent creators. This gives them access to broader trends
  • Amplify branded sounds - Brands can also create audio and use that as a promotional tool within the app
  • Create new sounds - Brands can also create new sounds and use that for promotions within their TikTok marketing campaigns

As the world went on lockdown during the pandemic, TikTok became the new form of entertainment. Everything was in its favor, starting from the user interface to the byte-sized 60-second long videos. This enabled the creators to rope in audiences from all across the globe.

The platform has delivered. And as a result, TikTok saw its user base multiply by many multiples during the pandemic. 

Now let’s get to the fun part, adding your own sound!

How to Make and Add Your Own TikTok Sound

One good idea is this: You can layer multiple types of sounds to arrive at the perfect sound you want.

Here are all the different ideas you can use:

  1. Use a Trending TikTok Song (or Audio)
    As you record a video, keep the beginning of the video interesting. An attractive song is the best way to do this. Follow trends to get an idea of what’s popular on TikTok’s sound library.
  1. Take Small Fragments of a Song
    Instead of combining full songs in your video take smaller fragments to use in the video and ensure the video compliments the songs used
  1. Record Your Own Voice
    Record your voice and mix it with a song to grab attention.
  1. Keep It Short
    Don’t extend the video for the sake of the song (or because you can now make 3 minute-long videos. Keep it short. Always ask yourself, how can I deliver this message in the most clear and concise way possible?


How to Do a Voiceover on TikTok

In this section, we’re going to take a look at how you can do voice overs on TikTok:

Here’s the step-by-step tutorial to do this:

  1. Record the TikTok video as you normally do
  2. Go to the editing screen. Here, tap the “Voiceover” button in the corner. A mic icon shows the same
  3. Find the video section where you want to add the voiceover and then tap the record button
  4. Once the voiceover is recorded, enhance it with a number of voice effects. Press the voice effects button above the Voiceover button. You can combine more than one effect to get better results
  5. Once you finish recording and editing, adjust the volume with the volume tool in the dropdown menu as voiceover button and move the Original sound toggle bar

Best Practices for Better Sounding Voice Audio on TikTok

This is a simple step-by-step section outlining what you need to do to use them for the best sound possible

  1. If you have no mic: Look for a quiet space with no echo to get clear sound
  2. If you can buy a mic: spend between 20 to 100  to buy a lavalier mic for recording clearer audio
  3. Avoid sounding tongue-tied: start by recording one sentence at a time so that you don't forget what you're going to say. You don't have to start from scratch this way.
  4. Structure ideas better: Start with the most exciting idea first to grab attention early in the video. It’s the same principle you see elsewhere.

How to add your own music or audio to your TikTok video

You can purely extract audio from a TikTok video or from a YouTube video through SSSTik.io. You can use the audio files you created and edit them inside VEED as well.

  1. Extract the audio/music files for the TikTok video file you want to edit
  2. Upload the edited or unedited video directly to VEED.IO
  3. Next, go to the upload tab on the left-hand panel
  4. Click on upload audio to load those audio files
  5. Adjust the position of the audio in the video timeline to where you want the overlap to begin
  6. If the TikTok video isn’t edited, customize the video with VEED’s editing tools
  7. Export and then download the video

If you do choose to edit your TikTok video with VEED here are some tools that will come in handy for your video:

  • Clean Audio: remove all background noises with a single click of the button
  • Split and Trim: remove unwanted parts of the video
  • Automatic Subtitles: automatically add and customize subtitles (you can add captions but not customize their appearance on TikTok’s editor)

Now you can also upload a video directly from TikTok onto VEED’s editor using just a URL!


7 Key Ingredients on how to make a viral TikTok sound

After analyzing thousands of sound patterns here’s what we notice that often tends to go viral on TikTok (as well as some best practices).

1. Get clues on what could go viral by doing your own research

Before you start adding audio to your TikTok, you need to do your research on what’s trending on TikTok. On TikTok’s audio page there’s a category for virtual videos with divisions that branch to top songs for different audio and music categories. What went viral before doesn’t have to go viral for you. But research makes it easy for you to see what makes these sounds so successful and reverse engineer some of that.

2. Keep the audio clean and free of distracting background noise 

The sound you add to the video file should be free of ambient noises as they can be distracting to the user when TikTok overlays sound on their videos. If your sound is part of your video file itself, you can use a tool like VEED which has a tool to clean audio with the click of a button.

3. Loopable short audio often goes viral most often 

Loopable videos are when the start and the end of the video are seamless. Looped videos with looped audios go viral often because they tell TikTok you not only retained viewers for 100% of your video but they kept rewatching it. Therefore, it must be good enough to share on other people’s For You Page.

4. Keep the volume up ‍

The audio needs to be loud enough not only so people can hear but also so they have more creative control. If  someone else wants to use your sound, they need to be able to raise or lower the volume to their own liking. Keeping the volume up gives them that flexible range to choose from.

5. Keep it original but don’t overthink it too much

Anything from an already trendingTikTok sound to a song to a conversation on phone can be part of TikTok. Posting will teach you about what it takes to be successful more than anything else will. Don’t aim to be perfect.

6. It (Oftentimes) Has to Be Weird

I guess being weird is the new “fresh”. The internet doesn’t rest on quality content any longer. It’s also about embracing the unexpected, the weird, and executing quirky concepts in the most entertaining way possible..

The TikTok generation grew up with the internet so they have both heard and seen everything online. More than any generation before them, they’re looking for fresh experiences. They want to watch and experience things they never watched/experienced before.

Creators must keep in mind that effects, pitches, and sounds are key to the experience you want to create. They play around with songs the audience might love and won’t forget that it has to be surprising.

7. Take advantage of whatever is relevant today

Start practicing recognizing trending potential. At one point every trending TikTok sound was all on its own before other people started using it.

As creators we need to develop our sixth sense of intuition to look at everyday life and see the content potential in something as mundane as your mom’s voice message about what to pick up from the grocery store to something cringe a celebrity said on a freshly released reality TV show episode.

And it’s not just influencers who can benefit from what’s popular on TikTok. Brands can engage bigger audiences on TikTok by showcasing their human side. 


Case Study: What Happens When You Create A TikTok Challenge?

Dice Alies, chose six TikTok influencers with a combined reach of 20 million users for the viral music campaign. The number of earned videos that came online as part of the campaign is 616 videos, reaching 830,800 views.

Viral videos are ranked by an algorithm that uses factors like views, shares, comments and allows any relevant video matching the criteria to get to the “for you” page—netting thousands of additional views. The dance challenge they created used the most catchy section of the song to double down on virality.


A few TikTokers picked up the challenge with the featured song. The best part? The challenge resulted in over 540,000 views in less than 36 hours with 2,500,000 songs replies.

TikTok Challenge Results

  • Number of likes: 103,500
  • Number of comments: 867
  • Number of shares : 1,672
  • Videos Created using the song: 429

The music you use, the sounds you use have an effect similar to what hashtags can do on other social media platforms. Use trending audio clips to boost discovery and increase the number of likes, comments, as well as views. You might even get people making duets of your TikTok video!

To find popular sounds you can use inside the videos you need to put in the effort to discover what’s most trending.

Here are ways to find the most trending music.

Sounds in the Video Editor

When you create a video, go to the Sounds button at the top of the screen. A new page pops up and you see a Discover page.

Next, you can see a list of recommended sounds and use a Playlist section with viral clips, trending sounds as well as music charts. You can explore the trending page to see what’s trending in different categories ranging from fitness to food and drink

Go through the sounds section and add what you like to the Favorites folder to use later

Save Sounds to Your Favorites

When swiping TikTok you’re going to find sounds you want to reuse. The favorites feature is a good tool to that end. This feature lets you add all the clips together and you don’t have to search for one clip or the other.

If you like a sound and want to save the same, tap the sound’s name under the username. 

An audio page appears that shows all the other videos that use the same sound for their content. What’s more, you get a button that allows you to add that sound clip to your favorites.

Use Sounds Your Followers Are Listening to on TikTok

Once you hit 100 followers you can switch your account to the TikTok PRO account. With the PRO account, you get access to their analytics feature.

Under followers, you’re going to see a list of sounds followers have listened to in the past 7 days. I need not tell you how rich of a goldmine that’s going to be for you.

This saves hundreds of hours of research and gives you plenty of ideas for your next video.

Never lose hope. It takes anywhere between 2 weeks to a month or more to figure out the style that fits them and finally nailing videos on TikTok that work well. Figure out new things that work.Once you find your style, it’s going to be easy for you to find success on the platform.

Spend at least 15-30 mins a day watching videos on the For You Page. It’s important that you make it a habit to spend at least 15 minutes a day watching videos on TikTok. This helps you get new ideas while also informing you about the latest trends. All of this is key when you want to create top content for your own business.

Remember this: most popular TikTok FYP videos are 60 seconds or less. 

Did you get any new ideas for you to use when creating your next TikTok video? Do let us know in the comments below.


How to Make Your Own TikTok Sound (and Upload it Too!)

George Mathew

One-click video editing, online.

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