This is an updated guide for anyone experiencing background noise such as dogs barking, your own breathing noise or even keyboard clicks while live streaming. There are a few things that may contribute to this.
Position of Your Mic
The position of your mic is very important and its best if its not sitting lower close to your desk surface. Make sure you mic is nearly the same height as your mouth. Uisng a Microphone stand that is height adjustable will help with this issue.
Improving Your Current keyboard
One of the real differences between a gaming keyboard and a quiet gaming keyword is the latter has dampers on the bottom of the key.
There are several type of dampers.
- One is made from foam and one particle type used is Sorbothane. Without dampers as you press the keyboard keys the noise you hear is the key hitting the bottom of the key thats been pressed.
- The other type are clear rubber o rings which is cheaper to buy and sell for under $8 on Amazon.
In both instances you need to pull out the keyboard keys attached the damper and place the keyboard key back.
Quiet Gaming Keyboards
Another solution is to buy a decent quiet gaming keyboard which are designed to minimise the noise these make. There are a few different products on the market today.
So when you click If this is a major issue for you a solution could be purchasing a quiet mechanical keyboard. These keyboards are much quieter than the standard cheap keyboards
Helping fellow streamers I would often get the messages in chat like but Wolfy we tried I am an Audio Engineer and we tried adding noise gate but it must be the cheap mic being used. No offence intended here but It don’t matter what your occupation is unless you have extensive experience dealing with certain applications then what your occupation is ireleavnt in this situation along with your solution which is to replace the mic.
Firstly do not use the Noise Gate. This option is rendered useless.
Here is how to do it.
How to Block Keyboard and Background Noise in OBS – Do the following
To make and test these changes correctly for any twitch streamer my recommendation is to create a 2nd Twitch account change your stream key go live on said account via and make changes and do tests live with someone in the stream.
Twitch allows 2 accounts to be setup using the one e-mail. It’s a technique used by many top twitch streamers and the reason behind this is you don’t want to go live on your normal account to then have people pop in stream and you end up getting varying opinions. If you do not want to do this then its going to take alit longer to achieve.
In OBS make sure you have a Mic added under sources.
Before you start notice the Mic meter on screen and start typing away. You should be able to see the meter moving. After adding these filters there should be no movement in the meter.
Right mouse click on your Mic and click on filter. Here you need to add a filter to your Mic.
Add the following filters in exact order.
1. Expander – this controls and blocks background noise such as keyboard clicks etc.
Preset -> Choose Gate
Ratio: 4:00
Threshold: -30DB
Attack: 10ms
Release: 125ms
Output Gain: 1.90DB
Detection: RMS
2. Noise Suppression
Method: RNNoise (good qaulity, more cpu usage) This helps remove mild background noise and noise from Audio resources like slight humming and so on.
3. Compressor – this controls mic noise like sometimes shouting in mic. So this controls that volume output.
Ratio: 4:00
Threshold: -18DB
Attack: 6ms
Release: 60ms
Output Gain: 0.60DB (If your voice in Mic is low increase this.)
Now you test your mic and you should now notice that your clicking is not being heard along with no shouting coming out in stream.
Hope this helps.