Mixing Kick and Bass

It all comes down to the samples for me.

Some will frown upon this, but if you can find a section of the song that's just kick, you can chop it out and throw it into your own sample blend.

Of course, you'll have to do some trickery to get it sounding right, but even if all you can chop out is a quick slice of the transient, you can still make it work. You can even do this with kicks that are played at the same time as hi-hats or toms, as long as the hats/toms aren't too loud.

To make it sound realistic, I recommend layering it in with real drums or room/OH samples that are RR + multi-velocity (i.e. Superior or EZDrummer). If you only have a transient to work with and need more "tail," print a small section of white noise, EQ match the white noise to the kick transient, print the EQ'd white noise, and then crossfade the EQ'd white noise with the kick transient and play around with the length + fade out of the noise until it sounds right.

If there's hi-hat in the kick sample, you can sometimes just leave it as-is and no one will notice. But you can also put a LPF on the sample and use the rooms/OHs for air and top end.

Doing this helped me realize what makes great records sound so awesome. On their own, the drums are always a lot more "boring" than what you hear in Superior/Slate/EZDrummer/Kontakt libraries, but that's exactly what makes them work so well — they stay in their own lane and aren't stepping all over the place, so everything else has room to breathe.

Interesting

I work in a lot of the darker / angrier realms of music and it's not uncommon to receive multitracks where everything's been quantized. We went from drums, to beat-detectived drums, then sample-replaced beat-detectived drums, until finally somebody said "why even record a real kit in the first place?"

Since the kick drum is a huge part of the mix, getting bass to work around it can be a thing. I usually just grab the de-esser on my channel strip (Cubase Pro just so happens to have a great one), and I'll put the frequency range somewhere between the first full octave of the song's fumdamental, using the kick's attack to push the bass guitar out of the way for about a 16th or 32nd note's worth of time (depending on tempo). I'll do this on guitars as well if the band is using one of those 9-string guitars that's almost an entire octave below a normal guitar in standard tuning. Nothing ridiculous, just kicking the bass out of the way a few db to make sure nothing takes too much away from the kick's attack.

I tried that same trick on a more traditional rock/metal type band (only tuned to drop-c!) and, since the drums and bass had some of the human quality left (though the playing was nice and tight), it sounded pretty stupid. But it's in my bag of tricks. De-esser / de-baser.... it's all in where you set those cute little hockey stick icons.

I think this comes down to one's preference in terms of the feel you like, but this is how I, too, edit bass... always put it slightly behind the drums. Sometimes just taking the time to do that takes solves alot of "mixing" issues with the low end.

Not a trick, but HPF on the other instruments and not killing all the low mids in the kick and bass. I think arrangement plays a big role, too. In the AM track, the guitar hovers mostly up around the high F power chord, only occasionally dipping down to the Bb or G.... this, along with a higher tuned snare, leaves a bit of extra room in the low mids (where the punch is) that the bass and kick can occupy without the whole thing getting muddy. 

In the absence of a thought out arrangment, though, aggressive use of the HPF can be one's friend!

Performance, performance, and performance. Failing that (because most of us mere mortals are working with/recording/mixing fellow mere mortals), you can sample-replace or augment the kicks (this is hugely helpful, esp when compression sounds wonky), or clip the drums, and for bass, tools like Ursa DSP Boost can help even things out in a way that compression cannot.

Of course, from there, you then need to compress nicely. Ha. Life sucks.

This is a big one. Kick gives you the impact, bass gives you the bloom.

EQ and effin magic.

Apparently this secret us widely known. It really works better than anything else. But yeah, compression too!

Funny thing about compression is, it sorta "fakes" the 'bass behind the kick' trick to a degree. The kick transient's big fat voltage will tell the compressor to reduce the gain, effective delaying the onset of the bass's attack.  Same kinda thing with the various ducking trickery discussed here.

Still not as groovy-sounding as the 'real deal', but it works. And if you combine the various concepts, you can really get some LF mojo happening.

...or so I've heard. I still hate everything about all of my mixes, LF included. 🤣

would you not send kick and bass to the same drumbus compressor? that always seems to glue them together for me, which maybe in this case, if going for separation, is not ask for.