How to Record Vocals in a Noisy House
Published · updated · by Loopin
Most people are not recording in a treated room. They are recording in a bedroom with traffic outside and a fridge two walls away. You can still get a take that survives mastering.
Get closer before you do anything else
The single most effective change is distance. Halving the distance between your mouth and the microphone raises your voice relative to the room by about six decibels — and the room noise stays exactly where it was. Recording at 15 cm instead of 30 cm buys you more than any amount of blankets.
Close work brings proximity effect, which thickens the low end. That is usually a bonus on spoken and rap vocals, and easy to trim later with a high-pass. Use a pop shield or sing slightly across the capsule rather than straight into it.
Pick the right corner, not the biggest room
Big empty rooms sound like big empty rooms. You want the deadest spot in the house, which is usually a small room with soft furnishings — a bedroom with a full wardrobe, curtains drawn, bed made.
Face into soft material rather than a bare wall, and stand away from the corner rather than in it. If you can, put the wardrobe behind the microphone: the first reflection to worry about is the one arriving from behind you, bouncing off the wall you are facing.
Kill what you can actually control
Turn off the fridge at the wall for twenty minutes. Switch off fans, air conditioning and any computer fan you can. Put your phone in aeroplane mode. Close windows. These take two minutes and remove more noise than most acoustic treatment.
Then record thirty seconds of nothing and listen back at high volume. You will hear things you had stopped noticing — a hum, a hard drive, a clock. Fix what you can, and note the rest so you know what to expect in the take.
Time it
Traffic and neighbours follow a schedule. Early morning and late evening are usually quietest; rush hour and bin collection days are not. If you are going to spend an hour on one vocal, spend it at the right hour.
This sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored. A take recorded at 6 am in a noisy street beats a take recorded at 5 pm in a quiet one.
Record more than you think you need
Background noise is much easier to hide under a dense arrangement than under a bare intro. Get several full passes so you can comp around the moments where a car went past, rather than trying to salvage a single take.
Keep the raw takes. Noise reduction is destructive and irreversible, and the version you process today is not necessarily the version you will want in a month. Keep every take together with the song so you can go back to the original when the arrangement changes.
Frequently asked questions
How close should I be to the mic in a noisy room?
Around 10 to 15 cm, with a pop shield. Halving the distance raises your voice about six decibels relative to the room while the noise stays put, which is a bigger improvement than most acoustic treatment.
Does a duvet or wardrobe actually help?
Yes, but mainly by absorbing reflections rather than blocking outside noise. Soft material behind and around the microphone reduces the roominess of the take; it will not stop traffic. For that, timing matters more.
Should I use noise reduction software?
Sparingly, and always keep the untouched take. Noise reduction is destructive, and heavy settings leave a watery artefact on the voice that is far more obvious than the noise you removed.