Kick and Bass relationship examples?

Of course, jmo, imo, ime, fwiw, although not as loud as recent stuff, the bass/kick interaction on the red hot chili peppers blood sugar sex magic is a good reference, thomas dolby's "science" is amazing, anything Earth wind and fire(G Massenburg) is nails, Eminem "gone crazy" is over the top because of the available space, one thing to consider is that its not a mistake that small bass drums are often accompanied by P bass's(motown) and big bass drums are often accompanied by J bass's(led zeppelin), appropriate orchestration during capture gets you a long way towards the final goal

Mike White is a great friend of mine, this is an excellent video he made that shows how most people get the "kick ducks bass" trick very wrong by smacking the transient, IME only a heavily parameter fortified hardware compressor can pull this off, but there are hundreds of plugins that can do it

Always carve out kick around 125Hz. Nothing but tubbiness there. Most people leave wayyyy too much bass below 70Hz in the mix. HPF as much of the woof off the bass as you can stand. Work on the 200Hz region on the bass, either with cuts or with frequency selective compression. Make that 70-250 bass region sit FLAT. Compress the daylights out of the bass so that it doesn't modulate with the kick.

OR, sidechain some ducking on the bass to the kick. Everytime the kick hits, it pulls the bass down ~4dB or so.

It's player and function dependent for me. If the bass player is busy and driving the song in a certain way, I want it to have a thinner low end, so that the movement isn't just a bunch of muddy crap. IF the drummer is funkier and doing a lot of doubles and quick syncopation, I was the BD to be a bit thinner for the same reason.

Then we also need to get into instruments. How muffled is the bass drum? How muffled should it be? Is the bass player using a pick on a bright, freshly strung bass, or fingers and 5 year old strings?

So, to use my time as a Tape Op Message Board moderator, the real answer is "it depends."

I feel you on the kick-bass struggle! For reference tracks, check out Kendrick's "Humble" (kick-dominated) and Daft Punk's "One More Time" (bass-dominated). It's common to have the kick lower in freq but the bass louder in volume. And yeah, filtering the bass can be scary, but HPF above the fundamental (around 80-100Hz) can create space and definition.

If you are having trouble with that relationship, you may need more treatment in your environment. I had what I thought was a well-treated environment for years and then during a remodeling, I added floor to ceiling corner traps. The difference, to say the least, was dramatic. I could hear exactly where the kick and bass were meeting/masking and set the HPF with more precision. Less guesswork.

In terms of references, the Dua Lipa record "Future Nostalgia" is pretty fantastic when it comes to an upfront bass driving the song with a massive kick holding down the lowend. Lot's of heavy hitters on that record... Spike Stent, Josh Godwin, Matty Green. I am sure there is probably a separate sub bass side chained to the kick, but the bass instrument (whether it be an actually bass or a VI) is pretty filtered.

What I noticed is the bass is quite heavily filtered and lives in the midrange more than you would think, which may not be possible in mixes with more midrange instruments like guitars, piano, etc.... That said, I seem to recall something about Motown records having the bass aggressively HPed at 80Hz because there was the belief that your ear would fill in the rest. There are alot of more organic hip hop records in the vein of the "The Roots" where I have noticed the bass is really aggressive HPed up to like 90hz with what seems to be a 36db/octave slope.

Like a dumbass, I only recently figured out how to real-time reference tracks via PT HDX (playing through Tidal, not imported into the session, etc.) so that I can A/B via my monitor controller. Something super helpful I've been doing is sending my mix to A and the ref track to B but only outputting through a subwoofer with the crossover set to 60 (low as it goes).

It's easily been revealing how much mud is down there in my mix and allows me to better clean things up and make sure the kick/bass relationship is close to the reference. YMMV.