SoundGym Community for Music Producers

Benjamin Buckley
Nov 15, 04:50 in SoundGym Cafe

Hello there. I’ve been using Soundgym for a little while because I want to develop my intuitions around recorded sound, ideally so that I can work on my own music and sound design projects.

I started out using Tonegym and am making good progress, as I already started with some basis in music theory. I’m also making progress in Soundgym, but I’m definitely finding it more difficult. According to the stats, apparently I’m ahead of 60% of users in Delay Control, Reverb Wizard, and DB King, so I assume I’m doing SOMETHING right.

However, the games I’m doing worst in right now are:

Peak Master, EQ Knight, and Filter Expert: I’m lumping these together because they’re all related to EQ. I think I have a basic idea of what EQ adjustments do, but the finer the details get, the harder a time I have.

Broadly speaking, I’ve been going by “If it sounds tinny or hissy like an old radio, it has more high frequencies; if it sounds like it’s underwater or in the next room, it has more low frequencies”. But I’m guessing that, to progress further, I need to get more granular than that. It’s not immediately obvious how to do that. I can SORT OF draw upon my experience in music to help a bit (e.g. if the higher notes sound louder, that implies that the higher frequencies have been boosted) but it’s still very difficult.

Stereohead: I’m not sure why I struggle so much with this one. On paper, it seems like such a simple idea, and I understand what I’m supposed to do, but I guess I’m just not great at figuring out the “distance” between the two audio tracks. I suspect part of the problem is that, until today, I hadn’t looked up how stereo width actually works? Apparently it’s a slight delay between the two sides? Maybe knowing that will help me listen better.

Compressionist: This is the one game where I genuinely have no idea what I’m doing. I THINK I understand what compression is. My understanding is that it’s sort of, reducing the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds, analogous to turning down the “contrast” in an image? In Dr. Compressor, for example, I listen for which sample sounds like it has less “information”, and it seems like another effect is that compressed sounds seem to “linger” a bit more (e.g. a compressed drum sound will seem to fade out rather than go silent immediately).

But that doesn’t help me to understand what the buttons in “Compressionist” are even doing. Insofar as I’ve had any success at all, I’m pretty much just guessing.

One resource I haven’t looked at much is the “Learn” section of this website. Are there lessons that would help me, especially with Compressionist and the EQ games?

Thank you very much for any help.

1 props

Danny Onionz
Nov 15, 05:54

100% agree with Jeff. used the same.

0 props

Ron Allen
Nov 15, 08:28

I think stereohead is much harder with headphones. If you are using headphones, consider playing the spatial games on speakers instead to see if you improve.

0 props

E A
Nov 15, 12:43

I struggled a lot with Stereohead (and still do) - as Ron pointed out it's harder in headphones but I always mix in headphones as my home studio is completely untreated. So I'm very strict about doing all games with headphones too. What helped me a lot with Stereohead is the Practice mode that just lets you explore what different stereo widths sound like. You can definitely hear the difference even with headphones on. Each time before you play a Stereohead game, spend a few minutes on the practice mode first.

For the EQ games, there is an EQ playground which will help you a lot, I think with EQ that's the only way, get used to hearing different EQ settings on different sound samples and you'll improve.

Compression is tricky but Compressionist is a good game to help with that, I would suggest spending a couple of minutes toggling between different settings before you take your guess, it will help your ears associate different sounds with different settings. The differences are often subtle with compression, but they are there. If you want to really master compression, sadly you'll need to do a lot of work off this platform as Soundgym only offer percussion samples for the compression games.

0 props

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