For a number of years, I’ve been using TrainYourEars as a tool to sharpen up my knowledge of frequency ranges and to help my ears differentiate the subtle differences that make the difference.
TrainYourEars EQ Edition is a piece of ear training software for PC and Mac designed to help you better understand equalizers and frequencies. It speeds up your learning process and exposes you to hundreds of random equalizations you have to guess. If you’re wrong, it will let you know “how wrong”, and it’ll also let you hear both your guess and the correct answer. For me, it has greatly improved the confidence I have in my EQ decisions and the speed at which I recognise “problem” frequencies in a mix.
At the start of this year, I created a Midrange Basics package for TYE. Control and balance in the midrange is so crucially important to a top quality mix, so it was great to put together some training for anyone who might struggle with the frequencies in this range.
Separation of the various frequency ranges (lows, low-mids, high-mids and highs) is not an exact science. Many engineers and many various equalizers will give you a different definition and they very often overlap.
If you want to achieve definition, clear out the mud and really separate your mix well, you’ll need to get familiar with the frequencies in the low-mids (250Hz-2kHz). The fundamental frequencies of a lot of instruments lie in this range.
The high-mids (2k-6k) contain complex harmonics that our ears pick up on very easily. Loudness, brightness, clarity, presence and speech intelligibility are all associated with this range, so it’s essential that we train our ears to differentiate between the various frequencies in this range.
Most people usually master low-end or high-end frequencies first and then start to get more attuned to what is going on in the midrange. Being able to further differentiate and fine tune between the low and high-mids can take a lot of work, but is worth it in the long run.
If you already have TrainYourEars EQ Edition, you can download the package here. You can use the import button to load them all in with ease.
If you don’t have the software and think it would help your audio education, then you can get 20% off by using this code:
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