Most Important Zoom Setting For An Online Percussion Workshop (Beatbox, Djembe, Drums etc)

Have you tried running a music workshop, class, private lesson over Zoom and found the participants volume suddenly goes very low? I ran into the very same issue when delivering my group beatbox classes online and it not only wasted a lot of valuable session time, but also made it very difficult to teach effectively as I need to hear the student clearly.

Zoom Suppresses (lowers the volume of) Intermittent & Persistent Background Noise

Zooms audio setting are usually automatically set to suppress intermittent and persistent background noise. This means that if you are in the middle of a Zoom call with someone or teaching a class Zoom will automatically suppress or lower the volume of noises that it thinks are background noises. This could be loud intermittent sounds from a building site or traffic noises for example.

The problem I faced was that Zoom also recognises beatboxing as unwanted background noise too so every time I or any of my students beatboxed, the volume was immediately lowered to an almost inaudible level. I assume that people playing any other percussive instruments over Zoom will be running into the same problem.

Here’s how to fix it!

How To Turn Off Intermittent & Persistent Background Noise Suppression

Here are the steps for turning off background noise suppression in Zoom (this is how it looks on my Macbook laptop, these steps might look different on other devices):

Step 1:

Login to the Zoom App, not the Zoom Website. You can easily locate this by going to your ‘finder’ app and searching for ‘zoom.us’.

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Step 2:

Click on your profile image in the top right-hand corner and then click on ‘settings‘.

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Step 3:

Click on ‘Audio‘ in the left-hand column and then the ‘Advanced‘ button.

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Step 4:

Set both ‘Suppress Persistent Background Noise‘ and ‘Suppress Intermittent Background Noise‘ to ‘Disable‘. You may only need to disable the intermittent suppression but I have both persistent and intermittent disabled and it works a treat.

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That’s it. Just remember to ensure that other participants that will be creating percussive sounds have this setting changed also and you’re good to go.

I hope this information is helpful to somebody.