Noise Suppressor
A Noise Suppressor removes steady background noise — hiss, hum, fan or air-conditioning drone — by learning where your "quiet" actually sits and gently ducking the signal toward it whenever you're not making real sound. It's built for constant, always-there noise, not one-off bangs or clicks.
Reach for it when:
- your room has a persistent hiss, hum or fan noise sitting under everything;
- you want a transparent cleanup rather than an aggressive AI-style noise removal — this node is deliberately simple: a noise floor tracker and a soft gate, not spectral subtraction.
FX inserts can be added and set up on Free, but they only affect the sound with Premium.
Adding it
On a channel's FX tab, click + Node ▾ → Time/Space → Noise Suppressor. It drops into the chain just after the selected node. To edit it, pin one of the dock's two panels to it with ⇅, or set a panel to ⟳ Follow FX tab selection and click the node.
In Simple mode, add it from the Effects block's ⚙ instead — see Simple mode.
Where it sits in the chain matters: put it early, close to the source, before EQ or anything else that might boost the noise floor back up.
Reading the panel
The graph is different from most gate/compressor-style charts in the dock: instead of a fixed dB scale, it plots level relative to the current noise floor — because that floor isn't a fixed number, it adapts continuously to what's actually quiet in your signal right now. The floor itself tracks slowly (so a brief silence doesn't yank it around), and MARGIN shows how far above that floor a sound has to rise before it counts as "wanted" and passes through untouched.
This panel is compact enough that it has no ⛶ maximize button; it always shares the dock.
Controls
| Knob | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMOUNT | 0…100 % | 60 | Overall strength. 0 = off; higher pushes the ducking harder. |
| MARGIN | 0…40 dB | 12 | How far above the learned noise floor your real signal must rise to count as "wanted". Higher = more borderline-quiet sound gets treated as noise (cleaner background, but can clip soft tails of speech or music). |
| RANGE | 0…40 dB | 24 | How deep the cut goes once it does duck — how far below the noise floor the level is actually pushed. |
| ATTACK | 0.1…20 ms | 1 | How fast the gain drops once the signal falls below the margin. |
| RELEASE | 1…100 ms | 4 | How fast the gain recovers once real signal rises back above the margin. |
A good starting point
- Add it early in the chain, leave everything at its default, and let it run for a few seconds of silence so it can learn your noise floor.
- Speak or play normally, alternating with pauses. Listen to how much of the background disappears in the gaps.
- If background is still audible, raise AMOUNT or RANGE; if quiet trailing detail (a breath, a soft note fading out) is getting cut off too abruptly, lower MARGIN or lengthen RELEASE.
A constant hiss or hum is exactly what it's built for; a single click, pop or door slam will pass straight through untouched — that's a different problem this node doesn't try to solve.
If it sounds wrong
| You hear… | Try… |
|---|---|
| Background barely changes | Raise AMOUNT or RANGE. |
| Soft trailing sounds (breaths, decaying notes) get chopped off | Lower MARGIN, or lengthen RELEASE. |
| A pumping or "breathing" background as it ducks in and out | Lower AMOUNT, or lengthen RELEASE for a gentler recovery. |
Presets, bypass and reset
- PRESET ▾ in the panel header applies a saved setup, or saves the current one under a name. Once one is applied the header shows Preset: name — see Knowing what preset is applied. Ready-made setups can be found in the Workshop — Workshop ▸ Browse, filter chip Noise Suppr..
- ON / OFF bypasses just this node — the quickest way to hear whether it's helping.
- RESET returns every knob to its default.
Related
- Noise Gate — a harder, threshold-based on/off cut; reach for it when you want dead silence between words rather than a gentler background reduction.
- Expander — a similar "push quiet parts down" idea driven by a fixed threshold instead of an adaptive noise floor.
- Effects Rack — adding, ordering and rewiring nodes.