A note on track choice

When it comes picking audio tracks for your personal ear training, the choice of course is up to you. Regardless, there are some things we want you to consider.

While one can learn many things when listening to a wide variety of music genres, someone working mostly on music containing heavy guitars will certainly get even more benefits from ear training when including such material in the track choice compared to just listening to generic "elevator music".

A general truth: you can't practice what you can't hear in the source material.

For example, a track without sub-bass is likely not suitable for training frequency perception in the sub-bass territory (note: even if a sub-bass might be perceived due to the psycho-acoustic effects of overtones, a cut in the sub-bass region likely will not be perceivable if no actual sub-bass content is present). Same goes for training the upper frequency area with heavily bandpassed material.

Another aspect is overall mix / master quality. It's the same thing as when choosing reference tracks during mixing or mastering: it should be rich in frequency content, well balanced, of quality that you would consider worth striving for. That being said, if you already have such reference tracks in your repertoire, then those certainly can serve as a good starting point for ear training.

If you opt for listen to full tracks as they are coming up in the playlist, consider that full tracks can vary a lot when it comes to their frequency content over time. For instance, a track containing an automated HPF filter sweep can trick you into thinking that the current 'turn' cuts something in the lows, when in reality it's just the source material that made that change. Same goes for other kinds of automated filter changes.

If you have some experience with mixing or mastering, you likely already know a possible solution to all this: loop a section within a given track that is rather "rich" / "full" when it comes to frequency content so that whatever random altered filter is applied, it will be perceivable. More often than not, the final chorus in a song fulfills this criteria.

An alternative approach would be to leverage markers. For instance, one could place a marker at the start of a section that has plenty of bass content. Then, when in doubt about there maybe being an altered filter in the low end, one can jump to that marker and double check. Yet another approach is to place the play cursor via mouse or use "cursor seeking" shortcuts to just skip to a more suitable section that looks less "timid" according to the waveform.

All that being said, there's also no reason to overthink this matter or limit yourself to "full" frequency content sections all the time. It can be an additional challenge to listen to softer passages while still trying to figure out what changes got applied. It also can serve as a means to make ear training more interesting at times. One could even argue it's a worthwhile thing to practice on "sparse" sections as well, cause that's after all something one would also be confronted during mixing / mastering.

Furthermore, once you've gained some ear training experience with a certain track selection, you might notice that certain tracks constituate a noticeable harder challenge for yourself. It's then up to you to decide if it's due to your own skills still somewhat lacking or due to the given track not being as suitable for ear training as you might have thought initially and it needing to be replaced with something else.