Gain and Q
When it comes to determining fitting gain and Q values, it simply comes down to your current skill level.
Initially be lenient with yourself and choose high gain, low Q values. But as you get better and go up in difficulty, you should aim for lowering gain and increasing Q. Though one should certainly also experiement with changing these within the same difficulty before moving on to then next higher difficulty, cause gain and Q changes certainly can increase the perceived difficulty, without a need to go higher in difficulty.
Going in 0.5 steps is a decent approach here. After all, being able to discern smaller EQ changes is another main object of ear training.
A helpful approach is to leverage the fact that while no round is ongoing, one can freely change between 'original and 'user' filter. The 'user' filter will apply the change indicated by current gain and Q values. This way one can determine usable settings by enabling playback and trying various 'user' filter locations. Basically a preview of what kind of changes would come up during an ongoing round.
In addition to changing gain and Q via SideBar settings, various mouse actions for changing them exist as well. See Controls window and search for "gain" or "Q".
'gain'' and 'Q' are Bound settings.
Don't be misguided by your own amount of practical experience
This section is more geared towards you if you're already quite experienced with practical equalization and have built up a certain amount if "fine hearing" over time.
Based on your experience in mixing, you might have encountered the following:
- during early stages of a mix, EQ changes might be bit bigger gain wise (e.g. bigger cuts)
- but as the mix progresses into later stages, EQ changes become smaller and smaller
- potentially below 1 dB, maybe 0.5 dB, at times maybe even lower
If you're into mastering, then you might as well have experienced that such suprisingly small, sub 0.5 dB changes can be perceived to make a small, but still noticable difference.
In both cases, likely, a sufficent listening environment (or good pair of headphones), enough experience and focused attention are given.
Where is this going? Why state this now?
Assuming you've made such experiences, you might be inclinded to strive towards setting 'gain' in EQdrill in a
similar fashion.
Or rather, you might assume that's at least were the training most likely should go towards: small, sub 1 dB EQ changes.
Now, let's just say, our experience with EQdrill has shown something quite different.
Even going as low as 3 dB of 'gain' can start to feel kind of ridiculously difficult during actual training, trying to clear a heatmap.
Why would that be? Is EQdrill broken in regards to applying the indicated gain amounts?
No! But there's no need to trust us just like that! We encourage you to try the following:
- start EQdrill
- pick e.g. "medium" difficulty
- prepare a fresh heatmap (fully reset)
- enable all snap points
- listen to some rich, well balanced audio material
- place the 'user' filter at various locations
- toggle between
'original'and'user'filter, effectively enabling / bypassing the filter you are seeing - try various gain values, increasingly going lower, even if it's to something like 0.5 dB
- during all this, try to judge for yourself if the filter is being applied the way you'd expect
The outcome here would be that yes, the resp. gain amount is being applied and, given sufficient "fine hearing" experience, one can perceive it.
That out of the way, you are free try quite small gain values for your training. Though you might come to a similar conclusion as we stated earlier:
"It feels kind of ridiculously tricky to train on such small gain values, even though I know I can hear them during practical EQing!"
To close off this chapter, we try to state our own hypothesis on why this phenomenon occurs. Mainly two things seem to be at play:
(1) missing visual priming
It's not to be underestimated just how much visually perceiving where a filter is placed, whether it will be a boost or a cut and whether it will be a a big or a small change, can help us guide our attention even before we come to hear the actual EQ change.
But if this "visual priming" is taken out of the equation and we are left to purely our hearing, it simply can become noticably more challenging.
If you've ever "EQed with a bypassed equalizer plugin" and it took you several minutues to figure out you were actually listening to some "temporary render of the mix", or "temporary render of the resp. track", which made it impossible to hear the changes you applied, but you still felt sure that what small changes you made "can clearly be heared", then you might already be aware just how powerful our visual perception can be and how much it can impact our expectation on "what we are suppposed to be hearing".
(2) lacking frequency content
For instance, imagine applying a 3 dB boost at 4 kHz to a rock production with distorted guitars Chances are that's pretty well perceivable.
Now imagine some really mellow, void of distortion, "kind of lacking in the high mids" production. Chances are that this same EQ change sticks out quite a bit less than for the rock production. If on top you image the visual feedback not being there, it might actually not "catch your ear" all that quickly to begin with.
In context of training with EQdrill, track choice (again) very much matters. If your goal is go lower and lower with gain amounts for your training, it likely becomes more and more important to pick fitting reference material, one that does contain rich enough frequency information around the frequency areas you are trying to train further.
What amount of gain to pick?
As a start, every 'difficulty' has a default 'gain' value associated with it.
Though that's really just a suggestion in the sense of an "entry point"!
If in doubt, just pick something on the higher end (e.g. 6 to 8 dB).
After clearing a heatmap with such a given gain amount and it seeming "quite doable", you can simply try lowering the gain amount by something along the lines of 0.5 to 1.0 dB and try again.
Eventually you'll find an amount that's "challenging enough" given you current training progress.
Similar applies to 'Q' values as well.
Start off bit on the "wider" (lower Q) end, then over time try going bit "narrower" (higher Q).
In particular this becomes more relevant as you're going up the 'difficulty' and "too wide" filter shapes might get in the way to pinpointing the "spot on" solution due to affecting neighboring frequencies bit too much.