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Here's my take:
First of all: You NEED to make sure you have good monitoring conditions. Otherwise you won't be able to hear what your plugs are doing to the sound. This is VERY important. Good monitoring means good monitors, but it also means good environment.
Then, as has already been suggested in this thread, make sure you are using a good kick sample to begin with! You can waste hours and hours trying to eq and compress a bad sample and you will never get anywhere. Seriously, try experiementing a little bit and audition different kick-samples together with the bass. When you find the right kick sample, you should be able to hear it - and then it probably only needs a little bit of tweaking with an eq if any at all.
However, sometimes you also need to tighten the bass. Obviously it depends on the sound (and the pattern), but here are some suggestions to try.
Cut (using HP-filter) anything below 25-30 hz. Sometimes you'll also want to low shelf in the area from 30 (or whatever cutoff you used) to approx 200-300, just a little bit to get rid of some mudness.
Another thing you can try, to tighten up the very bottom end, is to put a multiband compressor on the bass channel. Make sure that none of the bands are doing anything at all, except for the compressor for the lowest band. You will need to adjust the area, attack, release, threshold etc. for this band in a manner that makes the compressor work on the "problematic" area (i.e. the area that is causing the mix to sound muddy). This will tighten up the bottom.
If you find that the kick and the bass both sound good seperately but not together, you could try to do the following.
Put an analyzer (could be Waves PAZ if you have that) on both channels and try to get a visual idea of where the energy is in each track. (This will be the area where the line is dancing the most). Then you'll apply EQ to the tracks and cut in each track, trying to make room for the other (i.e. cut the kick a little bit in the area where the bass has its energy and vice versa). Ofcourse you should only do this as long as it SOUNDS good, but the analysing part often can be a very good idea to lead you in the direction of what areas are causing problems and where to cut (and sometimes boost).
Another thing you can do, is to sidechain the bass with the kick. This way the bass won't prevent the kick from cutting through the mix.
If you need the advice to be more specific, I think you'll have to give information about your kick and bass-pattern as well as a sample of each. Otherwise it's hard to tell you what to do. As you said yourself - no hard rules here...
Regards
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RiValMan
- Pumping the bits using:
My beloved MacBook Pro, Logic Pro X, UAD hardware and software and tons of plug-ins...
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