Hey!

Having just gotten to Diamond (finally!), I'd like to encourage others, and share how and why it happened for me. It's a bit (fine, a lot) longer post, but hopefully of some interest to some 😊.

I have seen people interested in game stats at different SPI levels, so I'll also share my current game stats. This is just to share one set of data on the game levels vs. SPI.

QUICK BACKGROUND

I'm a media composer, mainly film and TV, with some games and corporate music. For the bigger projects I work with, there is often a dedicated mix engineer. But for many others, I also do my own mixing. I've thought I have had decent listening skills, but recently realised.. I really didn't.

I started with SoundGym a few years ago. I think I got to about 18k points in a month of evening workouts, but sort of just forgot about it after a month. I do remember the frustration of not hearing things, already from then 😅.

MOTIVATION

Late December 2020, I invested in a private 1-on-1 live mix training session with a pro mix engineer from L.A. The thing that most blew my mind was the speed of his decisions. Especially the EQ decisions. Just listening for an individual mix track 3-4 seconds, and making the perfect EQ curve for it.

I wanted that too.

Having witnessed the incredible working speed, I set a goal of upping my critical listening game a lot. The SoundGym 30% discount was good timing, and I decided to invest work time to improve my listening.

So, I restarted SoundGym from my 18k points at the end of December 2020. A couple of intensive holiday days of gaming, I got to the ~40k Silver level. With that, I set a goal of having "Golden Ears" in 2021.

LISTENING GEAR

I've done all my exercises with headphones. From great planar-magnetic Oppo PM-1s, driven by very decent Apollo X6 converters/amps - to Apple Airpods. And some DT770 I got for our home piano.

How different it is? Not terribly. Some things are a bit easier to hear on different gear, but I just finished the latest workout with Airpods. In my case, the ears have been much more limiting than the listening gear - though I would've loved it NOT to be the case haha!

GETTING CARRIED AWAY

The training got a bit out of hand, and I ended up doing a few 6+ hour SoungGym days over holidays. With that, the "Golden Ears" goal of 2021 ended up taking only a few days. The SPI scaling is definitely not linear, I learned, so the points will increase a lot faster as the levels increase.

Those few days, it was a bit crazy though. My ears were so sore I couldn't even get my precious dosage of Mandalorian in the evening 😅.

The appetite grew further, and I changed my 2021 goal to the seemingly inhuman "Diamond Ears". It seemed ridiculously hard - I couldn't understand how these people really get to the 1000+k levels and above.

After the initial holiday crunch, I invested 2-3 hours each morning on SoundGym at my studio, for a few weeks.

As real work was piling, I reduced the time a bit. The best (and most sane) strategy for me was to spend 10 minutes on each daily workout game, and at the end another 10-20 mins on a single game I wanted to push to the next level. With a short break between each 10 minute session, to rest the ears (super helpful for me).

With that, it was some 20-40k daily SPI improvement on average. The SPI curve was looking like it might actually be possible to push to Diamond within January. There was also more internal pressure to progress, and days with slow progress were very frustrating.

I didn't reach the January goal, but did reach the (adjusted) 2021 goal within a month or so.

LOOKING BACK AND FORWARD

Was it worth the time investment and countless moments of frustration? I'm not sure, but I think it is. My listening has most definitely improved a lot. Especially being able to pinpoint audio phenomena more exactly.

For example, earlier I could hear something was "harsh in the upper frequency range". But it could have honestly been anything from 2kHz harsh to 8kHz harsh, I had to EQ sweep to try to find what was bugging.

After a crapload of listening training, I can separate pretty clearly the difference of 2kHz vs. 3kHz vs. 4kHz harshness, and often even the 500Hz ranges in-between. This is incredibly useful for my work.

The same for "bass frequencies". I honestly couldn't really separate the lows. If I wanted a "big bass", I'd often just boost 40Hz - as it's really low and that's how you get big bass, right (no, not really, of course..)? But I couldn't really clearly separate the different sound of 40Hz vs. 60Hz vs. 100Hz, and upwards up to the 400Hz. Now, I have significantly better sense of what each octave sounds like.

MOST USEFUL GAMES (FOR ME)

Avoiding any tips - as listening is such a personal endeavour - I'll list the games I find most useful for my work, as a media composer:

1) EQ Cheetah
I hated that game for sooooo long. Took forever to get even to the second level. Now it's the most useful EQ game for me. It provides a fast feedback cycle, building the internal model of what different frequencies sound like.

2) Bass Detective
I was happy to find this new game after my SoundGym restart, as I had realised I'm struggling identifying low frequencies. I also hated that game for a good while. Sometimes I still do, but it's improved my sense of low frequencies immensely.

3) Stereo Head (with PanGirl as runner-up).
This has surprisingly helped a lot in listening to reference music: where are different instruments panned, and how wide different elements sound like? And in general, how balanced mixes are built in the left-right -spectrum. Also, I often work with (virtual) orchestration, and it's a never-ending task to position instruments, so positioning skills help a lot.

Ok, sorry for the mega-long post! It's been a LOT of hours, and felt nice to have a bit of catharsis in the form of this post!

I still don't know how people get to the super-high SPI levels, so I guess that never changes. It was the same at 18k, it was the same at 250k, and it's most definitely the same at 1.300k haha!

PS. I still struggle at every single game (after the first two easy answers). Being consistent and sticking to a time-boxed plan has worked best for me. Wishing everybody the stamina to keep going 💪 !