How to remove keyboard noise from your mic

First, figure out which keyboard problem you have

Keyboard noise shows up in two distinct ways, and they have different fixes, so spend thirty seconds identifying yours. Type while staying silent, then type while talking, and listen back.

Problem A: constant clatter under your voice. The keys are audible the whole time you type, even mid-sentence. This is a pickup problem: the mic is physically hearing your keyboard, through the air or through the desk, and it needs physical fixes plus some processing to soften what is left.

Problem B: the gate pops open on every keypress. You are not even talking, but each key strike punches through as a short burst of room sound. You already have a noise gate, and the keyboard is tricking it. Every thump crosses the threshold, the gate swings open, and your audience hears a stuttering clatter of key, room tone, key, room tone. This one has a precise fix, and it lives in a setting most people never touch.

Most setups have a bit of both. Work through the fixes in order and each pass gets you quieter.

Fix 1: move the problem away from the mic

No processing beats not capturing the noise in the first place. A mechanical keyboard makes noise on two paths: click sound through the air, and thump vibration through the desk into anything standing on it, including a mic on a desk stand. Attack both:

1. Get the mic close to your mouth. Every halving of the distance makes your voice louder relative to everything else in the room. A mic at 10 cm barely hears a keyboard that a mic at 60 cm hears clearly. Close is the cheapest noise reduction there is.
2. Get the mic off the desk the keyboard sits on. A boom arm clamped to a different surface, or even a stand on a separate side table, breaks the vibration path completely. If the mic must share the desk, a shock mount and a thick desk mat under the keyboard absorb most of the thump before it travels.
3. Use the mic's rejection. Most streaming mics are directional: they hear what they point at and reject what sits behind them. Point the front at your mouth and put the keyboard in the dead zone behind or below the capsule. With many desk setups this alone drops the clack dramatically.
4. Soften the source if you can: o-ring dampeners, quieter switches, or simply typing lighter during stream segments where the mic is hot.

Do these first. Everything below works far better on a keyboard the mic can barely hear than on one it hears loudly.

Fix 2: noise suppression for the clatter under your voice

For problem A, the clatter that rides under your voice while you talk and type, reach for noise suppression. Honesty first: suppression is built for steady noise like fan hiss and hum, and keyboard clicks are short transients, so it will not erase them. What it does do is strip the steady component of your room and soften the tail of each click, which makes the remaining clack quieter and less harsh.

1. In patchd, open your mic strip's effects rack and add a Noise Suppression node via + Add Node.
2. Use the Mix control to blend it in. At 100% you get full suppression; pulling it back toward 60 to 80% keeps your voice more natural while still cutting the floor. Set it to the lowest amount that makes the typing acceptable.
3. Keep suppression before the gate in the chain, so the gate sees the cleaner floor. The rack adds nodes where you want them, and dragging reorders them.

Fix 3: the star fix, teach your gate to ignore the thumps

Problem B, the gate popping open on every keypress, is not a bad gate. It is a gate with good hearing and bad taste. Here is what is actually happening: a key strike on a desk produces a burst of low-frequency energy, roughly in the 100 to 300 Hz region, that thumps through the stand into the capsule. You barely hear it as a tone, but a gate does not listen the way you do. Its detector measures raw loudness, and that low thump carries plenty of it. The detector sees energy over the threshold and opens, exactly as designed.

The fix is to filter what the detector hears. patchd's gate has a sidechain high-pass in its advanced controls, a filter from 20 Hz up to 2 kHz that applies only to the gate's detection signal, never to your audio. Raise it and the detector goes deaf below the cutoff: the thump region stops counting toward the threshold, so keys stop opening the gate, while your voice, which carries strong energy well above the cutoff, still opens it instantly. Your actual sound stays full-range the entire time. Only the detector wears the earplugs.

Set it up like this:

1. Add a Gate node via + Add Node if you do not have one, and set the threshold normally first: a few dB above your room floor, comfortably below your speech. The full walkthrough is in how to set up a noise gate.
2. Open the gate's advanced controls and find Sidechain HP. It defaults to 20 Hz, which is effectively off.
3. Stay silent and type hard. Raise the sidechain high-pass until the keys stop opening the gate. For most desk setups that lands somewhere between 150 and 300 Hz.
4. Now talk. If the gate still opens crisply on every word, you are done. If you have a deep voice and the gate hesitates, back the cutoff down until speech opens it reliably again, and let threshold tuning handle the rest.

Fix 4: threshold and hysteresis, the cleanup pass

With the detector filtered, two more gate settings mop up whatever sneaks through:

1. Raise the threshold slightly. The high-pass removed most of each key's energy from the detector, so the little that remains is now far below your voice. A couple of dB of extra threshold buys margin without clipping quiet speech.
2. Add a few dB of hysteresis. Hysteresis makes the gate close at a lower level than it opens, which stops borderline events from making it flutter. If an occasional double-strike still flicks the gate, 3 to 6 dB of hysteresis steadies it.

One honest limit: a gate only protects the gaps. While you are actually talking, the gate is open and the keys ride along with your voice. That is why the physical fixes and suppression come first, and the gate seals whatever silence is left.

How patchd puts the whole fix in one place

patchd is a virtual audio mixer for Windows: your mic is a strip, and the strip has a real effects rack. The whole keyboard chain lives on that one strip, added via + Add Node and running live as you talk: a high-pass or EQ to cut rumble, noise suppression with its Mix control for the floor, and the gate with its sidechain high-pass, all free nodes on every channel. You tune the threshold against the strip's live meter, and the result is what every destination hears, whether that is your headphones or the bus your call app uses as its microphone. If the clatter is bothering a stream mix specifically, the same rack feeds your separated stream routing too, so you fix the keyboard once instead of once per app.

The short version

• Close mic, separate surface. Distance and a broken vibration path remove most of the problem before software starts.
• Noise suppression softens the clatter under your voice; blend it with Mix.
• Raise the gate's sidechain high-pass to around 150 to 300 Hz so key thumps stop opening it. Your audio stays full-range; only the detector is filtered.
• Threshold and hysteresis steady whatever is left.

patchd ships all of this free on every channel: suppression, the gate with its sidechain filters, and a live meter to tune against. It is in development now. Join the waitlist and we will tell you the moment it is ready to install.