BACKGROUND:  An artist, musician, and engineer whom I greatly respect is giving me a hand with some mixing and mastering.  In a couple of my test mixes, he pointed out that I should carve out separate spaces in the frequency spectrum for kick and bass.  I had already done that to a certain degree, but he was correct that my treatment was not enough and I was not getting a clear distinction between kick and bass.  The kick was far more prominent in one song, and the bass was far more prominent in the other.  I made some corrections and the songs definitely sound better.  So far, so good.
 
QUESTION:  All that said, however, does anyone have cases in which they have allowed the kick and drum to share the same frequency space, giving the audible illusion that the bass has some percussive punch, or allowing the sounds to blend as one?  In many of my songs, the bass and kick play closely together.  I totally agree with the advice above, but was wondering if there is anything inherently bad about a blended sound in some cases, provided you don't burn up too much headroom in any particular frequency zone.
 
Example: I have a cowboy two-step in which the kick and bass play right together all the time.  I was wondering what it would sound like to keep them as one punchy sound, with half the low energy assigned to each.
 
THANKS!

We feel the Bass, We hear the overtones. 
Both instruments need some higher harmonic content to be heard, especially because most peoples playback systems have no low end. So always listen to hear your bass and kick on one of these systems, The ultimate is open your song on a smart phone! 
 
I have for some reason found that the TTS-1 default Kick cuts through in country type mixes best of all, It has a thump and a tick. 
My Bass I record via my 01v so I can add a eq bump at 300and 1000 and I also use a compressor on it. It took a while and a new set of Pick ups but I get perfect results now I have that set up.Of course each bass needs different treatment. And the mistake most make is adding way to much low end. I actually have a hi pass set around 80 with a long slope on the channel. I never touch my bass tracks after they are recorded, just set the level. 
You can listen to some of my new tracks in the link in my signature. 
 

Thanks, Johnny.  Although I know in my brain what the starting point is, I am really having a tough time with the details.  It seems like I go up one db and all I hear is the bass.  Go back down one db and I lose it.
 
Although I have been doing this a while 1-I am more of a songwriter than engineer and 2-although I am a pretty decent mixer, this is a very critical area to get right.  Unfortunately, most of the tutorial videos out there have examples of 808 kicks and MiniMoog-sounding basses, which does not apply to me at all.  I bought a Groove 3 series on mixing country, but the bass they use sounds like a very metallic slap bass--like Seinfeld fades.
 
This is really just a question of degree (e.g., how much 60 hz boost on the kick, how much—if any—300 hz boost on the bass, what corner freq HPF on the bass, etc.).

Well you are far more advanced and experienced a producer than I am but Mr. Danny Danzi has provide me with this tidbit on multiple occasions in regards to the relationship between kick and bass as far as carving out freqs for both to co-exist in a mix peacefully.
 
Make a choice. Do you want your bass or your kick to be the percussive element or have the "whomp" in the mix?
 
If you prefer a clickier more defined kick then your bass will be filling out the bottom end and you should carve out the lower end meat of your kick to allow it to do so.
 
If you want your bass to have more attack then carve out it's bottom end where the meat of the kick sound lives to allow the kick to be more thuddy.
 
So...
 
thick kick = thin bass
 
thick bass = thin kick
 
Simplistic but it makes sense and seems to work. I've also seen tuts where the engineer compensates for the lack of attack on one in instrument or the other in either scenario by creating a by creating a spike (or multiple spikes) on the EQ of the muddier track at frequencies well out of the way of the fundamental. It might sound weird solo'd but it adds some attack to that instrument in the mix.
 
That is all theoretical though so don't take my word for it. I have been able to get some better results messing with those concepts.

Oh there's the problem,, sampled bass's,,,I gave up years ago, they are all way out for me and believe me I did try to like them as it would make use of a lot of midi files I have with well played bass parts, but I just can't get even close to my own real bass. . I guess I'm lucky that Bass is one of my long time main instruments. I started when I was 12 years old. 
I find it odd that so many sample are so bad.. It's like the people who do the samples have weird taste in tones. This is a good thing for new types of music but I'm just plain old traditional. 
Because I believe in only recording what sounds good to begin with I spend my time working on the sound before it's gone in there. 

konradh
All that said, however, does anyone have cases in which they have allowed the kick and drum to share the same frequency space, giving the audible illusion that the bass has some percussive punch, or allowing the sounds to blend as one?  In many of my songs, the bass and kick play closely together.  I totally agree with the advice above, but was wondering if there is anything inherently bad about a blended sound in some cases, provided you don't burn up too much headroom in any particular frequency zone.

Well if it sounds right, it sounds right! But you've given me an idea for a blog post to close out virtual instruments month. I have some "freebies" designed to go with the EB 5-string expansion pack - two ProChannel presets, and five TH2 bass amps. I could flesh that out with an article that goes into the subject of kick+bass in more detail.
 
When carving out frequency spaces, there are three important points to remember:
 

• Kick and bass have a certain amount of energy above the fundamental and they are very different sounds. What really helps differentiate them is how you EQ the bass harmonics, beater click, kick ring, etc.
• Psycho-acoustically, if you hear the higher elements of the kick or bass, your brain will tend to fill in the lower elements. 
• The carving can be a "sandwich." For example with 5-string bass, I'll give the ultra-low frequencies to the bass, the lows and lower mids to the kick for a solid thump, then accent the higher mids on the bass. It can even be a club sandwich  - with an electronic kick, you can boost the highs that sit above the bass to bring out the click .

 
The main reason people avoid layering bass sounds is because the risk is too high that they will smudge together and become indistinct. However, that doesn't have to be a bad thing if the major accent is on the vocals, harmonies, etc. Maybe you don't want to draw attention to the lower frequencies - problem solved.
 
I'll post a link in the blog post to a song I just finished mixing (the video is rendering now). In it you can hear both the bass and the kick very distinctly, with the kick holding down the low end, and the EQ on the bass being a little bit of a low boost so it reinforces the kick but doesn't overpower it, a scoop in the low mids to leave plenty of room for the thumb, and lots of high-frequency shelving.
 
Don't be too analytical unless you're not getting the sound you want. If not, analyze what's not working, think about what you want to hear, then reverse engineer a solution. A good example is that resonantor thing I came up. The shaker didn't seem to blend well with the track, so I pictured it as having more elements in common with the other instruments. I tried giving it a sense of pitch, and that worked...probably other things would have worked as well, but I had the sound I wanted so I stopped pursuing it.
 
 
 
 

Hey.  Totally cool to like what you like, but I am using the Scarbee basses from Native Instruments (Rick, J-Bass, and P-Bass).  Being a bassist, you may have a different take, but I have recorded lots of honest-to-goodness real basses in the studio, and these Scarbee things sound really good to me.
 
The thing is though, the bassist playing the parts is the key.  You could probably make the Scarbee basses sound excellent, but it might take a lot more work than just playing it on your bass guitar.

I've found some really good bass samples for MIDI amongst the included patches that sound pretty darned real. The loopty loop stuff is silly though and hard to work with because it's all pretty much premixed and... well I can write my own darned riffs. lol
 
"New" country bass is weird though. It's pretty full and effective for what it's supposed to do and I really respect those fancy Nashville engineers but it is all so specific I don't think that style really applies to other stuff.
 
There are a lot of really interesting mixing vids on groove3 that are a little more generic and easier to apply to multiple styles. I particularly like the EQ Explained one and the Mixing Rock stuff. There's also one that I think is Sonar specific (IIRC) where the dude mixes three different styles within the same series so you can see/hear/learn the different approaches. Considering a month's pass is only $15 bucks it's worth it to peruse a plethora of vids instead of sinking cash into one series methinks.
 
When Cake gave us that free pass I cleared my schedule for a whole month and did nothing but watch vids for 6-8 hours a day and take notes. I got through about a dozen or so series on all sorts of topics (theory, mixing, using specific effects, ones dedicated to working Sonar, etc). What a whirlwind of info. lol

Don't under estimate the value of a HPF or in this case (a couple of HPFs)..... if you have a bass and kick that step on each other, tuning a couple of HPFs can sometime separate them in a mix.  I know it sounds simple but give it a try.
 
Jim

Thanks, Jim.  I agree.  I HPF almost everything (except the kick—and I would HPF it if it were a live recording with pedal noise).
 
At this point I am over-worrying; but, nothing sounds worse that a CD with way too much kick and bass.  The issue is making sure you don't go too far the other way and deliver something that has no power.
 
The particular things I am working on are harder than usual for a number of reasons.