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How to stop mic bumps, desk thumps, and handling noise in REAPER

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published September 4, 2026 · Updated September 4, 2026

You finish a take, listen back, and there it is: a dull thud when you shifted your weight, a low boom every time your hand brushed the desk, or a soft rumble under the whole thing. That is handling noise, and it is one of the most common ways a good home vocal or podcast take gets spoiled by something that has nothing to do with your voice.

The important thing to know first is that this is mostly a recording problem, not a plugin problem. You can clean up a fair amount after the fact, but the reliable fix is to stop the vibration from reaching the mic in the first place. Here is how the noise gets in, how to prevent it, and what REAPER can and cannot do about what is left.

What handling noise actually is

A microphone is built to react to sound in the air. The problem is that it also reacts to physical vibration that reaches its body. When you bump the mic, knock the desk, or step near the stand, that mechanical energy travels through the stand or the surface and into the mic housing, where it gets turned into a signal right alongside your voice. Microphone makers call this handling noise, and it is a known side effect of any mic that is mounted or held rather than perfectly isolated.

Two things make it worse in a typical home setup:

• The mic is on the desk. A desk stand or a boom arm clamped to the desk shares a solid surface with your keyboard, mouse, elbows, and anything else you touch. Every tap travels straight to the mic.
• Most of the energy is low. Bumps and vibration land mainly in the low frequencies, below the range where your voice does its useful work. That is why handling noise reads as a thump or a boom rather than a click, and it is also the reason a high-pass filter helps so much.

It helps to separate handling noise from two neighbors it gets confused with. Plosives are blasts of air from hard p and b sounds hitting the capsule, not vibration through the stand, so they are a mouth-and-pop-filter problem. Continuous low rumble from traffic or an air conditioner is airborne and steady rather than a one-off knock. The prevention and cleanup overlap, but knowing which one you have tells you where to aim. For the air-blast version, see how to remove plosives in REAPER; for steady environmental low end, see how to remove wind noise and low rumble from a recording.

Fix it at the source first

Every minute you spend here saves you editing later, and it fixes problems that no plugin can. None of this needs to be expensive.

Clean up what is left in REAPER

Once the take is as clean as you can get it going in, REAPER handles the rest with stock plugins. Work in this order.

1. High-pass the low rumble

Add ReaEQ to the vocal track and set the first band to a high-pass shape. Start it around 80–120 Hz for most sung and spoken voices. Because handling noise sits mostly below the voice, this quietly removes a lot of the boom and rumble without changing the sound you want. Slide the cutoff up until you hear the voice start to lose body or chest, then back it down until the warmth returns. A deep voice may want it near 70–90 Hz; a bright or spoken voice can often sit at 100–120 Hz.

2. Edit out the thumps in the gaps

For a distinct thump that lands between words, the cleanest fix is to remove it by hand rather than reach for another plugin. Zoom in until you can see the thump as a low, rounded bump in the waveform, split the item on each side of it with S, and either silence that little piece or pull its item volume handle down and add short fades so the edit is inaudible. A take or track volume envelope does the same job if you prefer to draw it. This is the same manual approach used for one-off noises like a cough or a chair creak, covered in how to remove a cough, click, or one-off noise from a take in REAPER.

3. A gate only helps between phrases

ReaGate, REAPER's stock noise gate, can automatically quiet the gaps so a thump in a silent moment is turned down for you. Set the threshold just above the room noise and use a gentle release so words do not get clipped off. Be clear about its limit though: a gate is open while you are talking, so any thump that happens during a word passes straight through untouched. A gate cleans the silences, not the vocal itself.

What this will not do

Cleanup has real limits, and it is worth knowing them before you spend an hour fighting a take.

• It will not cleanly remove a loud thump that lands under a word. The high-pass thins its low end, but a sharp knock also has energy up in the mids, and you cannot cut that out without cutting the word.
• A gate will not remove noise while you are speaking. It only manages the quiet gaps.
• None of it replaces the shock mount and the stand. If the vibration keeps coming in, you will be editing the same problem on every take. Fixing the setup once is faster than fixing every file.

If it still sounds off

Quick troubleshooting order when the thumps are still getting through:

1. The mic is still coupled to the desk. A shock mount does nothing if the stand itself is on the same surface you are tapping. Decouple the base or move to a floor stand.
2. The high-pass is too low to help. If a boom survives, nudge the cutoff up toward 120 Hz and listen for the voice thinning. Stop just before it does.
3. It is a plosive, not a bump. If the thumps line up with hard p and b sounds, that is air hitting the capsule, and a pop filter plus the plosive fix will do more than any stand change.
4. It is steady room rumble. If the low end is constant rather than a series of knocks, it is environmental, and the wind and rumble guide covers that case.
5. It is the room itself. If moving the stand and recording again keeps things clean, the setup was the problem. Recording in a spot with fewer hard surfaces around the mic, like the approach in how to record vocals in an untreated room, helps here too.