Complementary EQ Techniques (Complimentary EQ)

Tips, Techniques and Tutorials
Complementary EQ

Something I don’t hear much discussion about is the use of “Complementary EQ”. This concept is something I use all of the time in my mixes, but even more importantly and unbeknownst to some, it really can and should be applied to the recording process.

The basic idea behind Complementary EQ is that you carve out spaces in a mix by being aware of where you’ve already made cuts and boosts.

Keeping in mind there are no steadfast “rules” in the mixing or recording process, the easiest example I can think of is that often a mixing engineer will pull a few decibels of 300h-600hz out of the drums, and boost around that range on the bass. Cutting a hole in the drums tends to make them sound less “boxy”, and gives space to make the ever important mid-range of the bass to be boosted.

After starting to write this I pulled up a mix I was working on yesterday and found a perfect example.

Here is the EQ that I had applied to the kick drum:

Here is the EQ that I had applied to the bass guitar:

Here is an image of the two separate EQ curves layered on top of each other:

Notice the complementary relationship of the EQ curves?

This entire concept obviously goes well beyond the relationship between bass and drums, as all instruments in a mix directly affect each other and how we perceive them. In a modern rock mix there are relationships between guitar and vocals, cymbals and vocals, guitar and bass, keyboard and bass, etc that all directly affect each other. Also, let’s not forget that effects such as delay and reverb also take up their own sonic space.

But here’s the clincher (and the real point of this article), it’s way more important to get this right during the recording process than during the mix, and NOT via the use of EQ.

You may now be asking yourself, “Hey, how in the hell do I use the concept of Complementary EQ without touching an EQ?!”

EASY – pay attention to the tone of the instrument, the mics, and adjust accordingly. In fact, proper arrangement of sounds in its own right is a sort of complementary EQ.

One of the most common mistakes an amateur producer makes is the wrong choice of “sound” for a part. In fact, I was working on a mix last week where there was both a key bass melody and a bass guitar melody in one section of the song. The parts didn’t mesh that well, and the fundamental energy of both instruments was between 70Hz and 300Hz. No EQ or mixing engineer on the face of planet can fix this issue.

-Christian

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