Break

Critical listening tires our ears / brains and impacts our judgement, oftentimes quicker than we would like. Taking regular breaks can help offset this phenomenon and help us regain some objectivity.

EQdrill offers a dedicated 'break' feature for this. It can be enabled via the SideBar.

Break type: 'time'

With 'time' selected, one can configure two values:

'When (min)' indicates the amount of time after which the break happens. Fractional minute values are possible (e.g. 0.5 minutes is 30 seconds). The time starts ticking once the round is started (regardless of playback state). The remaining time can be seen by hovering the mouse over the respective input field. A tooltip will show:

It works like this: Once the 'When (min)' countdown has elapsed and the ongoing turn has been completed, playback will be paused and a break window will be shown:

The countdown will keep counting into the negative, which allows for judging how long the break actually went on. Even if the break hasn't elapsed down to 0, you are free to skip the break.

In any case, once you consider the break as over, you will need to press the button at the window bottom or use the 'escape' key to close the break window. Playback will resume if it was ongoing before the break window opened.

Break type: 'turns'

With 'turns' selected, it is very similar to the former, but instead of a 'When (min)' countdown determining the occurrence of the break, a 'When (turn)' value determines after how many completed turns the break occurs. The remaining turn count until break occurrence can be seen via the same tooltip. Everything else is the same as for break type 'time'.

How long and how frequent to take breaks?

We suggest you simply try out the feature with some default values, get to know the break types, see what you prefer, and then just trial-and-error. In our experience it's a worthwhile endeavour, which also can teach oneself just how much one benefits from various approach to taking breaks while doing critical listening in context of equalization. To the point of it giving food for thought on incorporating such short but regular breaks into actual mixing / mastering sessions.

Nevertheless, there's no need to force this feature upon yourself if you end up finding it more annoying than helpful. Maybe you will favour a training approach along the lines of "full on 20 minutes sprint" training, couple minutes of review thereafter, then call it a day regarding EQdrill. You might conclude there's no need for "breaks" for such short sessions and based on your own training experience, because those "breaks" don't noticably improve your performance. If so, by all means, skip the breaks in that case!

Just because EQdrill has a bunch of features doesn't mean they all have to be enabled for successful training. Rather they are meant to provide various means of configuration.