How to Mix Bass and Kick

I always like to say that if the low end of your mix isn’t properly balanced, the entire mix will suffer. This is where the anchor of your mix in the kick resides as well as the low end of the bass which represents the notes and acts as the compass of the mix exists. Getting the two elements to work together can be difficult because you can’t separate them like other tracks as both the bass and kick sound best when they’re front and center in the mix. With all this in mind, let’s talk how to mix bass and kick.

First off, make sure that you’re listening to your mix in a good space and with equipment so that you can actually hear the bass and kick.

Check out my overview on where to mix music, and remember the golden ratio:

It’s worth mentioning that unless you’ve got an ideal room and speaker setup with speakers capable of clearly reproducing the low end down to 40Hz and beyond, you may be better off using a decent pair of headphones to get your low end balance right:

For mixing headphones, I myself have used the Audio-Technica M50X studio monitoring headphones for nearly a decade and can attest to their solid bass response.

As always, I also recommend having a reference track at hand, preferably right in your mix so that you can toggle back and forth between your mix and it with a hot key. This allows you to stay focused on your goal in what you want your mix and specifically the low end to sound like, so pick a mix where you like its bass and kick balance in particular.

You can even put a low pass filter on both your mix and the reference track around 200Hz to focus entirely on the low end of each.

Bouncing back and forth between your mix and the reference makes for a better tutorial alone than any article could (but… well… keep reading!).

This is ESPECIALLY helpful when setting the volumes of the bass and kick relative to one another because, despite what you might see, there’s no golden formula for perfectly setting their relative volumes.

The best option is trusting your ears, and especially with the context of a reference mix’s low end on hand.

Sidechain Your Bass to Your Kick

As I mentioned in opening and as I covered in my audio panning guide, the kick and bass sound best in your mix when they’re centered:

This is largely because, due to the fact that the kick and bass are so integral to the mix, you want them to be consistent across the mix regardless of where someone is listening (to the left or right of speaker(s), up close, farther away, etc.).

You can only achieve this if an element is centered in the mix, which is why 99% of the time, general wisdom states the bass and kick should both be centered.

The problem with this is that both instruments share a similar fundamental frequency range, meaning their peaks exist between 60-100Hz.

Here is an illustration of the kick’s average fundamental:

… and one for the bass, as well, which alludes to the point I’m about to make:

Normally when you have two tracks which share a fundamental frequency playing at the same time, the easy fix is to pan they far apart in the mix. Because we can’t do that with the kick and bass, we can instead duck the bass for a split second when the kick triggers.

This gives the kick complete dominion over the real estate that is its fundamental frequency (typically around 65Hz, give or take), creating a clearer, cleaner low end and mix overall.

While this can be done with a static cut like I showed above or even sidechain compression (as I outline in my sidechain bass to kick tutorial), you can perform a more surgical cut which exclusively targets the kick’s fundamental on the bass track with dynamic EQ.

I put together a complete tutorial on how to sidechain EQ your bass to your kick, creating a reactive cut around 65Hz whenever that kick triggers. The upside of this is that it leaves your bass more intact, so it’s not as intrusive and creates a more transparent solution in the mix.

Here I’m dropping an instance of my favorite EQ plugin, FabFilter Pro-Q 3, on my bass. I then create a band at 65Hz on my bass, right click that band and select “Make Dynamic”, then select the kick as the sidechain source to control the behavior of that band:

All that’s left to do from there is adjust the threshold on that band while the kick is triggering to pull out roughly 5dB from the bass at 65Hz.

You can adjust the band to pull more for a cleaner pocket for the kick, or less for more transparency, but I find 5dB or so goes a long way in cleaning up the low end.

The majority of the bass is preserved yet we’re still getting the benefit for the kick which is akin to using a surgical knife by way of the dynamic EQ versus a sledgehammer by way of simple sidechain compression which would pull down the entire bass track uniformly when that kick plays, regardless of frequency.

High Pass Every Track in Your Mix

Lastly, a lot of times the source of the problem when you mix kick and bass comes from the other +90% of the tracks in your mix.

Adding a high pass filter to every track in your mix is the fastest way to clean up your mix’s low end by removing noise, unflattering frequencies, and simply put frequencies which don’t contribute anything to that track or the mix:

This removes ambient noise from the room or outside of the room as well as bleed from other instruments (like in the case of drums) which microphones pick up as well as electrical noise from DI recording.

This also once again removes frequencies which are inherent on the tracks themselves but which don’t contribute to your mix. This is one of the keys to not just getting a better bass and kick mix but cleaning up a lot of the mix mud throughout your entire mix.

Lastly as one final bonus, these high pass filters add significant mixing headroom to your mix when added up over the sum of virtually every track. This allows you to achieve a (better, more natural sounding) louder mix.

Grab my free EQ cheat sheet for specific, quick visual guides on where to high pass specific instruments and get the best, more transparent results in your mix.