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Computer fan and street noise are in every quiet vocal take — what do people actually do in a normal room?

Recording vocals and acoustic guitar in a spare bedroom. The performances are fine. What is not fine is the background.

Between takes I can hear the computer fan, a fridge through the wall, and traffic. On a loud passage none of it matters. On anything quiet it is clearly there, and it becomes obvious the moment I compress, which is when a quiet take turns into a quiet take with a hiss and a rumble underneath it.

I have tried a noise reduction plugin, which works and makes the vocal sound like it is underwater if I push it at all.

I cannot build a booth and I cannot move the computer to another room easily. What actually reduces this rather than masking it?

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  • @noise_floor_nell · 6h ago

    Measure before you buy or process anything, because you have at least three different problems in that list and they have different fixes.

    Record thirty seconds of silence — nobody in the room, everything running as it normally does — and look at it. Then repeat with the computer off, then with the fridge unplugged for a minute. Three files, and comparing them tells you which source is actually dominating rather than which one you notice.

    Most people are surprised. The fan is usually not the biggest contributor; the low rumble from traffic and appliances is, and it is inaudible as a sound while being very present in the file.

    Then fix in this order, because it is cheapest first and each step makes the next less necessary:

    Move the microphone, not the noise. Every doubling of distance from a noise source drops it substantially. Turning ninety degrees so the microphone's dead side faces the computer often does more than anything you can buy — a cardioid pattern rejects the rear strongly, and most people have the machine directly behind them without thinking about it.

    Get closer to the source. Closer to the microphone means more signal for the same noise, which is the whole ratio. Half the distance is a large improvement, and it costs nothing.

    A high-pass filter removes rumble that is below anything your voice or guitar produces. This is the one processing step that is not a compromise.

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  • @machine_in_hall · 6h ago

    On the computer specifically, since you said moving it is not easy — it is usually easier than it sounds and it is the single biggest win available.

    The options in ascending order of effort:

    A long cable. A USB extension or a longer monitor cable and the machine goes on the far side of the room, behind furniture, or out of the door. Two or three metres of distance is a large reduction.

    Point it away and put something soft between. Even a duvet over the back of a chair between you and the machine helps at the frequencies fans produce.

    Stop it working during takes. A lot of fan noise is the machine doing something it does not need to do — a backup, an indexer, a browser with forty tabs. Fans that spin up during recording are usually responding to load you can simply not create.

    Fix the fan curve if it is a desktop you control. Many run far more aggressively than they need to at idle.

    On the fridge and the traffic: those need mass, not foam, and mass is what you cannot do in a rented bedroom. What you can do is time it. Record when the road is quiet and unplug the fridge for the take, with a note on the door so nobody wonders. That sounds unserious and it is what a lot of people actually do, because it works completely and costs nothing.

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