In many engineering scenarios, self-excited vibrations lead to undesirable results. Aeroelastic flutter, machine-tool chatter and flow-induced instability of structures are some well-known examples. Such vibrations are typically characterised by robust attracting limit cycles which makes their control a difficult task. This article outlines different strategies for the control of undesirable self-excited vibrations in smooth and non-smooth engineering systems. The control of flow-induced vibration by using parametric excitation in structure elasticity is demonstrated first. It is shown that the amplitude jump due to internal resonance between the wake and the structure in the lock-in region can be mitigated by parametric excitation. Parametric excitation leads to the formation of newer internal resonance regions which can be made to fall outside the original lock-in region by tuning the frequency ratio. Recent work on control of flow induced vibration using bistable nonlinear energy sink is outlined next. The bistable sink suppresses internal resonance in lock-in region and outperforms cubic sinks in control performance. BNES partitions the lock-in region into chaotic and non-chaotic subregions with an amplitude jump between the two. The article next deals with the control of non-smooth friction-induced vibration. The suppression of stick-slip oscillations in a three degree-of-freedom disc brake model is outlined. The discontinuity induced bifurcation responsible for this suppression is also illustrated and discussed.