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Re: What are your top tips and best practices for reducing background noise?
Using a directional, dynamic microphone instead of a condenser can help too. They are less sensitive, and pick up less background noise as a result.
Also getting the mic as close to you as possible (without clipping the input) will ensure it picks up more of you, and less of everything else. A boom arm can help a lot with this. For most mics, if you extend your thumb and pinky fingers from each other, that's about the right distance. But for some dynamic mics (like the Shure SM7B I use) you want to be pretty much on top of it, which helps even more.