Keyboard Typing Sound
- Thread starter ramco1917
- Start date
Dave Gaffer
New Member
Does this just happen in Excel?
The keyboard is probably coming into the same mic as the sound you want to record. Once that happens, it's impossible to "unmix" without also damaging the intended sound. The same goes for room reverb, traffic outside, etc.
In other words, this is probably an acoustic problem, not an electronic one. Thus, any electronic solution, or combination of electronic solutions, can only mask or reduce the problem, not fix it. The actual fix, is acoustic.
You might be able to find some processing that sufficiently reduces the unwanted sound without damaging the rest *too much* (EQ, noise gate, adaptive noise suppression, etc.), but the best solution is to not have the problem to start with. Just don't let the keyboard sound (or anything else you don't want) wiggle the diaphragm in the mic.
Use the mic's directional pattern (cardioid, figure-8, etc.) to reject whatever comes from the keyboard's direction (and don't move the mic once you've found that spot!), and/or get a quieter keyboard.
It may also help to put a sheet of plexiglass between the keyboard and the mic as well, for the same reason that the drums in a live concert often have some between the cymbals and the vocal mics. In that setting, they're called "shy baffles", and they work wonders for keeping the vocals clear, simply by blocking the direct sound from the loud cymbals to the necessarily-sensitive vocal mics.
I'm a live audio engineer. I know how to use all the gadgets, bells, and whistles on almost any sound board, from the old-school analog "sea of knobs" with a rack of processors beside it, to the modern digital "computer with a big sound card". It also means that I know what they DON'T do! Whenever a mic is involved, acoustics will *always* be important, regardless of processing.
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Do you happen to be using a machine with an NVIDIA RTX GPU?
If so, take a look at the Noise and Echo Removal in NVIDIA Broadcast: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/broadcasting/broadcast-app/
That looks interesting. Unfortunately, my hardware is too old for that. :-( And my media rig is on Linux and that tool is Windoze-only.
But one of the direct features is that it removes keyboard noise. If you decide to try it, please report back with "before" and "after" recordings of how it actually worked, along with enough pictures or video of your rig ("potato cam" is fine for this) to see what it's up against.
The old principles never change - the true solution is to not let the unwanted noise into the mic in the first place, so that you don't *need* to filter it back out again, and any kind of filtering also modifies the intended signal in some way - but as processing power becomes cheaper, maybe the tools are also getting closer to the limit of theoretical possibility, which itself might be imperceptible to us. (but still measurable to someone who really cares)
(It seems amazing to me, that a tool that a professional broadcast engineer could only dream of and desperately needed sometimes only a decade or two ago, is now free to any bumbling fool who happens to know it exists...or at least that's what the ad seems to say. We'll see about reality.)