The kick sounds good alone, the bass sounds good alone, together the low end turns into mush that pumps. I've tried carving 60-80Hz out of the bass, then tried carving it out of the kick instead, and both versions sound worse than doing nothing. Sidechain compression helps but makes it sound obviously ducked. Is there a step I'm skipping before EQ?
On the ducking sounding obvious — shorten the release. Most people set 200ms and hear the pump. Try 40-60ms release with a fast attack and only 2-3dB of gain reduction. You want to feel it, not hear it.
Also check the note. If the bass part sits on a note whose fundamental is close to the kick's tuned pitch you will get beating and pumping that no EQ fixes. Tune the kick so it's a fifth or an octave away from the root of the track, or use a kick with less pitched content.
This is the answer people skip past. Most sampled kicks have a clear pitch and it's usually somewhere around F. On a track in F sharp everything gets muddy for reasons that look like an EQ problem and aren't.
One more: check how much low end is coming from things you're not thinking about. Room mics, piano, pads and even reverb returns pile up under 100Hz. High-pass everything that isn't kick or bass at 100Hz and the low end often clears up before you touch either.
Listen in mono at low volume when you're judging this. Loud and stereo hides exactly the kind of build-up you're describing.
@monitor_riser_mo · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Decide which one owns the sub before you touch an EQ. You can't have two sources in the bottom two octaves and expect definition — one of them has to be the weight and the other has to be the attack.
If the kick owns it: high-pass the bass around 50-60Hz with a fairly steep slope, and get the bass's presence from harmonics around 700Hz-2kHz — a little saturation there makes bass audible on small speakers without adding any actual sub.
If the bass owns it: keep the kick short, let it live from about 80Hz up with a clicky 3-5kHz component, and stop trying to make it feel huge in isolation.
The reason your carving didn't work is that you were cutting the same region from both, so nothing filled it.
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@carb_clean_cal · 5mo ago
That's exactly what I was doing. Picked the kick as the low end owner and high-passed the bass at 55 with saturation up top and it immediately sat.
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@monitor_riser_mo · 5mo ago
Good. Next thing to check is phase — flip the polarity on the kick and see which way sounds fuller with the bass. Takes two seconds and sometimes it's the whole fix.
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