The teaching plugins

The teaching plugins

In a plugin browser they are ABC Learner EQ, ABC Learner Comp and ABC Learner Verb, by soundkorb. Everything sorts under ABC so the four arrive together rather than scattered across the alphabet. This page uses the short names in prose.

Three real effects that process your host's audio and explain themselves while doing it. Every parameter is host-automatable and saves with the session, like any other plugin.

	What it is
ABC Learner EQ	Four bands - low shelf, two bells, high shelf - over a live spectrum with the response curve drawn on it. Guide text appears while you turn a frequency knob.
ABC Learner Comp	A soft-knee compressor with a gain-reduction meter that fills downward, because that is the direction the sound goes.
ABC Learner Verb	Room, hall, plate and spring, with decay, pre-delay, size, damping, mix and width.

Practice audio

Open one outside a DAW and it would be silent - so the title row has a source selector. Off by default (a plugin that starts injecting audio into a session on its own is a bug), and it plays from the same library Ear Trainer imports your music into. See Training on your own audio.

Training modules

Learner Comp and Learner Verb have seven each, one per control. Open them with the checklist icon in the title row.

A module is four steps:

1. Watch. The plugin sets the knob for you and explains what changed, on a sound the control is actually audible on. Attack does nothing you can hear on a sustained pad; pre-delay disappears inside a busy loop. Choosing the material is the teaching.
2. Try. A goal in words. The knobs stay live - the panel covers the analysis section only.
3. Check. The plugin sets the control to a value it does not show you and plays it. You switch between Reference and Mine and turn the plugin's own knob until they match. The knob never shows the reference: it reaches the audio past the parameter.
4. Result. What it was, what you said, and whether that counted.

The tolerance is per-control, and that is the point

Control	Graded in
attack, release, pre-delay, decay	percent of the value
threshold, makeup, band gain	dB
ratio	ratio
frequency	octaves
damping, size, mix, width	percent of the range

Being 5 ms out on a 3 ms attack and on a 300 ms attack are completely different mistakes, so attack is graded as a proportion. Three tiers - roughly, confidently, precisely - and no more, because one knob does not need ten.

The sounds are generated, not sampled

A fixed set of files is a fixed set of answers: play the same kick twenty times and you stop hearing a kick and start recognising a recording. A kick here is a starting pitch, a pitch decay, an amplitude decay, a click amount and a drive, each drawn fresh per hit.

Walkthroughs

Under the modules, past a divider, are the two multi-knob lessons each plugin has always had - a whole workflow rather than one control.

Why Learner EQ has no modules

Deliberately. Graphical EQs with many bands, dynamic processing and better analysis already exist and are excellent; teaching someone to turn these four knobs competes with them and loses. What a beginner is actually missing is where things live - a kick's fundamental against its beater click, where a voice's body ends and its harshness begins. That is a map, not a knob drill, and it is not built yet. See ADR 027.