EQ Frequency Band Trainer
Train the single most useful mixing skill: hearing which EQ band is boosted. A looping source (pink noise or a rich synth tone) gets one peaking band lifted; you name the region and its character — boom, warmth/mud, boxy, nasal, presence, sibilance or air. Difficulty widens or narrows the boosted band.
🔊 Use headphones or good speakers at a moderate volume. This is an uncalibrated, ear- and device-dependent practice aid — your score is a personal practice metric, not a certification, test, or measurement. The boosted band’s centre frequency and gain are exact (a Web Audio peaking filter), but the descriptors — “warm”, “muddy”, “boxy”, “airy” — are the conventional, subjective vocabulary mixing engineers use, and the lines between regions are soft. Small speakers and earbuds barely reproduce deep boom (below ~50 Hz) or air (above ~14 kHz), so those bands are harder on modest gear. Your best score is stored only in this browser.
Set up the trainer
Pick a difficulty and source, then press Start trainer. The loop plays continuously while you compare.
Session score
How It Works
Each round, the trainer picks one of the standard EQ regions at random and applies a peaking (bell) filter to a looping source with the Web Audio API. The filter’s centre frequency, gain and bandwidth (Q) are exact numbers, so the boost itself is not subjective — only the name you give the region is conventional. You then pick which band you think is lifted. When you answer, the tool reveals the exact centre frequency, the band label and a short note on what that region does in a mix. Use the A/B button to toggle the EQ in and out so you can hear the boost against the flat source — that is exactly how engineers learn to recognise a frequency.
The seven core bands follow the vocabulary most mixing and mastering engineers share: roughly 60–120 Hz is “rumble / boom” (weight and power); 200–500 Hz is “warmth / mud” (body, or congestion if overdone); 400–800 Hz is “boxy” (the cardboard-box honk); 1–2 kHz is “nasal / honky”; 2–5 kHz is “presence” (attack and bite, and where the ear is most sensitive); 5–8 kHz is “sibilance / edge” (the “ess” range); and 10–16 kHz is “air / crispy” (sparkle and openness). Difficulty controls the bandwidth: a wide boost colours a whole region and is easy to place; a narrow boost lifts a slim slice and is much harder, closer to the surgical cuts you make on real tracks. The Expert level splits the spectrum into nine finer bands for serious practice.
Two honest cautions. First, those region names are a shared shorthand, not a standard — opinions differ on exactly where “mud” ends and “boxy” begins, and the same boost sounds different on different material. What is exact here is the centre frequency in hertz and the filter maths. Second, this is an uncalibrated practice aid: your speakers’ and headphones’ own frequency response, your volume, and your room all colour what you hear, so a high score here is ear training, not a measurement or a certificate. The skill it builds — instantly hearing “that’s a 3 kHz presence bump” or “there’s mud around 300 Hz” — is the real, transferable goal.