Setup guide
How to sound better on video calls
The person on the other end hears your microphone, your room, and whatever the call app squeezes it through. Most of that is fixable: half with your hands and a pair of headphones, half with a processing chain the call app never even knows is there.
What the other side actually hears
Video call audio fails in four predictable ways: a noisy floor (fan hum and hiss sitting under your voice), an unsteady level (loud when you lean in, gone when you lean back), a boomy or dull tone (the sound of a laptop mic pointed at a hard desk), and echo (your speakers feeding back into your own mic). Call apps compress audio hard to save bandwidth, and compression punishes all four: noise gets smeared, level swings get exaggerated, and echo turns into that underwater double-talk everyone recognizes.
So the plan has three parts, in order. Fix the physical problems first, because no software recovers what the microphone never captured cleanly. Then run your mic through a short cleanup chain. Then hand the call app the processed voice instead of the raw mic. The first part works today with zero software. The second and third use patchd, a Windows virtual audio mixer currently in development.
Step 1: fix the physical problems first
Three moves, ten minutes, no downloads:
Get the mic close. Aim for roughly 10 to 20 centimeters, about a hand's width, from your mouth, slightly off to the side so breath does not hit the capsule directly. Distance is the single biggest lever you have: every doubling of distance drops your voice relative to the room, so a mic at arm's length is mostly recording your walls. If you are on a laptop mic, this means sitting closer to the laptop than feels natural.
Soften the room. Hard parallel surfaces make the hollow, roomy sound people describe as calling from a bathroom. A rug, curtains, a bookshelf behind you, even a couch in the room all help. You do not need acoustic panels; you need fewer bare walls between your mouth and the mic.
Wear headphones. Any wired pair beats speakers. When your voice comes out of speakers, it re-enters your mic and the other side hears themselves echoed back, or the call app's echo canceller mangles your voice trying to prevent it. Headphones remove the loop entirely. If people still report echo, how to fix mic echo walks through the remaining causes.
Step 2: put your mic on its own patchd strip
In patchd, add your microphone as a selectable input. It gets its own strip: a fader for its level, a live meter so you can see yourself speak, mute and solo, and an effects rack. The strip is where everything in the next step lives, which means the processing happens once, in one place, and every call app downstream gets the same cleaned-up voice.
Step 3: build the cleanup chain
Open the mic strip's rack and add four nodes from the + Add Node menu. Each one targets one of the four failures from the top of this guide:
Noise suppression strips the steady noise, fan hum, air conditioning, computer whine, out from under your voice. It has a Mix control (0 to 100 percent): start at 100, and if your voice ever sounds thin, back it off until the artifact disappears. The concept is covered in what is noise suppression.
A noise gate handles the gaps. Suppression cleans under your words; the gate closes your channel completely between them, so keyboard clatter and chair creaks while you listen never reach the call. How to set up a noise gate covers dialing the threshold so it opens on speech and nothing else.
EQ fixes the tone. Two moves do most of the work for a call: a high-pass around 80 to 100 Hz to remove desk rumble and boom, and a gentle presence lift somewhere in the 3 to 6 kHz range so consonants cut through the call app's compression. How to EQ your microphone walks through both by ear.
A compressor steadies the level, evening out the lean-in-loud, lean-back-quiet swing so you sit at one consistent volume. A 3:1 ratio is a sensible starting point; how to set up a compressor on your voice explains the settings in plain terms. All four nodes run in real time on the strip, in the order you arrange them.
Step 4: route the strip to a bus
A bus is a virtual output that other apps see as a microphone. On the mic strip, light the Bus 1 routing pill under the BUS header. That is the entire routing step: the strip's processed signal now feeds Bus 1, and only what you route to a bus ever reaches it, so a music app or a second mic stays off your call unless you deliberately light its pill too.
Step 5: select patchd Bus 1 as your microphone in the call app
Open the audio settings in Zoom, Teams, Meet, or Discord and change the microphone from your physical mic to patchd Bus 1. The call app now receives the processed voice, suppression, gate, EQ, and compressor already applied, and treats it exactly like any other microphone. One caution: turn off the call app's own noise removal if it has one, since two noise processors stacked on the same voice tend to produce the robotic warble you hear on bad calls. Run the app's mic test, or a tool like this mic test, and listen for a silent floor between words and a level that barely moves while you talk.
Where patchd is today
Everything in Step 1 works right now, with hardware you already own, and it is worth doing regardless of what software you run. patchd, which handles Steps 2 through 5 with one strip, one rack, and one bus, is in development. Join the waitlist and we will tell you the moment it is ready to install.