How do I fix background noise in my video?
Hiss, fans, hum and room tone are the fastest way to make a good video sound cheap. Most of it comes out, if you fix it in the right order: record cleaner first, then denoise, EQ and gate in the edit.
By Thomas, founder of CutScore · Updated June 2026
Background noise is rarely a single villain. It is a fridge two rooms away, a laptop fan, the air conditioning you stopped hearing an hour ago, traffic through a single-pane window, and the faint hiss your microphone adds for free. Stack those up and your viewer hears a wash of grey behind your voice. They cannot name it, but their brain quietly files the video under "homemade" before you have finished your first sentence.
Here is the part that trips most people up. The noise is loud because the mic is far. The further the mic sits from your mouth, the more gain you have to add to bring your voice up, and that gain lifts everything else in the room by exactly the same amount. So you do not have a noise problem so much as a distance problem wearing a disguise. I have shipped a few early videos recorded from across a desk, and the cleanup afterwards was always worse than just moving the mic would have been.
The good news: steady noise is the easy kind to remove. Hiss, hum, fans and AC are constant, so software can learn their fingerprint and subtract it. The hard kind is the one-off: a door slam, a car horn, a chair scrape that lands right on a word. Knowing which kind you have decides whether this takes two minutes or a re-record.
The order to fix background noise in your video.
Run these from top to bottom on your voice track. Each one targets a different kind of noise, and doing them in order keeps the voice natural instead of underwater.
| Step | What to set | What it kills |
|---|---|---|
| High-pass filter | ≈ 80 Hz | Low rumble, traffic, AC drone and desk thumps you feel more than hear. |
| Denoise / noise reduction | 6 to 12 dB | Steady hiss, fan whir and mic self-noise sitting under the whole take. |
| Noise gate | soft threshold | Room tone in the gaps, so silence between sentences is actually silent. |
| De-hum | 50 / 60 Hz notch | The electrical buzz from bad cables, dimmers or cheap power. |
| Gentle EQ | small cuts only | Boxy or harsh frequencies that the denoiser left a little exposed. |
| Loudness pass | ≈ −14 LUFS | The risk that your now-cleaner voice ends up too quiet in the feed. |
Not sure how much noise is too much, or whether your fix made it worse? CutScore listens, measures the gap between your voice and the noise floor, and tells you exactly where it is worst.
Five passes, in plain language.
1. Record cleaner before you fix anything
The cheapest noise reduction happens before you press record. Move the mic close, a hand-span from your mouth is a good start, and you instantly need less gain, which means less room. Switch off the obvious offenders: AC, fans, the dishwasher, anything with a motor. Then deaden the room. A carpet, a sofa, curtains, even a duvet behind the camera turns a hard echoey box into a soft one. None of this costs money, and it does more than any software pass you will run later.
2. High-pass first, denoise second
Start with a high-pass filter set around 80 Hz. It rolls off the low rumble, the AC drone and the desk thumps, none of which carry your voice, so cutting them costs you nothing and clears space. Then run the denoiser. Most tools let you grab a short sample of "just the room" with no talking, so the software learns the noise and subtracts only that. Keep the reduction modest, somewhere around 6 to 12 dB. Past that the voice starts to warble.
3. Gate the gaps, then de-hum if needed
A noise gate is the quiet hero here. Set a soft threshold and it mutes the track whenever you are not talking, so the room tone disappears in the pauses and only the speech survives. Keep the gate gentle, or words will clip on at the front. If you hear a steady electrical buzz under everything, that is hum, and it lives at 50 or 60 Hz depending on your country. A de-hum tool or a narrow notch filter at that exact frequency removes it without touching your voice. Bad cables and dimmer switches are the usual suspects.
4. Decide if the take is even savable
Be honest with yourself here. Steady noise comes out; events do not. A constant fan or hiss has a stable fingerprint, so the denoiser can lift it cleanly. A dog barking on your punchline, a motorbike, a chair scrape on a key word, those overlap the voice and there is no clean way to remove one without scarring the other. If a one-off sound lands on something important, the real fix is usually to re-read that line, not to fight it in software for an hour. I have lost whole evenings to this. Re-recording the sentence takes ninety seconds.
5. Re-check loudness, because cleanup makes things quiet
Denoising and gating almost always pull your overall level down, so the last step is to put it back. Normalise the voice toward −14 LUFS for YouTube so it does not feel timid next to the next video in the feed, and keep your true peak at or below −1 dBTP so nothing crackles after the platform re-encodes your file. Then listen on the worst speakers you own, a phone, cheap earbuds, a laptop. If the voice is clear and the silence is genuinely quiet on those, you are done. Audio is half of what we analyze for a reason: people forgive a soft shot, but they click away from noisy sound.
Here is a real CutScore report for an everyday video: the audio scored, the noise flagged with timestamps, loudness checked against target, and the exact fixes.
If you only fix three things.
You will not always have an hour for a full cleanup stack. These three remove most of the noise most people hear, and they are quick.
By ear, with plugins, or in one pass.
By ear in your editor
Free, and fine for steady noise. Most editors ship a high-pass, a noise reducer and a gate. The catch is the one we keep hitting: your ears adapt to the noise as you work, so you stop hearing it and either under-fix or over-fix. Take a break, then listen fresh on cheap speakers.
With dedicated plugins
Powerful and precise. Specialist noise tools learn a room print, separate voice from background and undo a lot of damage. The cost is money and a learning curve: too many sliders, easy to over-process, and you still have to judge the result by ear against a loudness target you have to know.
With a coach in one pass
Hand the file (or a link) to CutScore. It measures the noise, the voice-to-noise gap, the loudness and the peaks, then points to the exact timestamps and the fix for each. No room prints to capture, no sliders to second-guess. See a sample report.
Frequently asked.
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