Good stuff, guys.  In many cases, my kick and bass are right together, so sidechaining/ducking doesn't help for some, but it could on others.
 
The Transient Shaper concept is interesting and worth a try.
 
Although we have had some very deep and excellent ideas, I think I was just struggling with getting the kick/bass balance right in some kind of busy mixes. :-)
 
Thanks again.

It's one of the hardest things to do, IMO. Even when Mastering, it's one of the biggest challenges to keep them in balance when the artist wants them smashed to the sky loud. One other valuable thing is this: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Infer that, you work to keep things out of the way vs. filling the void, and you end up with a cleaner mix, which allows you to get exactly what you want.
 
I know I've worked on many totally dense mixes to the point where there just isn't any way to open it up. I've had to just tell the artist, "I can't make a salad out of slaw."

Anderton

Lynn
Konradh, depending on the song, one way to distinguish bass and bass drum is to pan them apart.  Say, like 11:00 and 1:00 or 10 and 2.  Low frequencies aren't as easy to differentiate their location as mid and high frequencies are and tend to sound centered.

The only downside to that approach is it pretty much ends the option to do a release on vinyl. I realize that's not an issue 99.99% of the time, but you never know...

Vinyl?  I never thought of that, but that does lead to several questions which would make a good thread.  

Lynn

Anderton

Lynn
Konradh, depending on the song, one way to distinguish bass and bass drum is to pan them apart.  Say, like 11:00 and 1:00 or 10 and 2.  Low frequencies aren't as easy to differentiate their location as mid and high frequencies are and tend to sound centered.

The only downside to that approach is it pretty much ends the option to do a release on vinyl. I realize that's not an issue 99.99% of the time, but you never know...

Vinyl?  I never thought of that, but that does lead to several questions which would make a good thread.  

Answered...

Hi Konrad.
 
This is one area where I've been trying to improve my mixes too.  However while you're obviously an acoustic guy and I'm more electronic, I am however very familiar with what a piano should sound like (as I learnt to play on one) and also how it should be recorded so in my productions, I always try to get the piano as natural sounding as it can be but you're right in that standards are so high now and the public have become accustomed to hearing music and vocals which have been doctored beyond natural sounding and any deviation (or truer natural sounding), sounds weird to them so I understand - I think???
 
Anyway, here's my humble suggestion and what I've been doing as an engineer also told me to carve out space in my mixes.
 
Firstly I now put Voxengo SPAN on the master channel of every project so that I can analyse each track's frequency spectrum by soloing it.
 
Secondly, in terms of ducking the bass where needed, I'll use about a -3db reduction and to avoid the colouration that most compressors add, I use the Sonitus Gate in Sonar as this can be side-chained and works really well as you can see the attack and decay of the gate in operation as a waveform so achieving what you need is even easier.  It also adds no artefacts to the sound and on that basis, I think it's a fantastic tool!
 
Thirdly, I've been looking at kick drums in other productions and I've noticed a few things.  Some producers seem to tune their kick drums to the root note of the song whereas others leave it alone.  I personally can't be bothered with that level of detail as I've also found that it is here where you can get a phase cancellation or even one sound mud-out the other!  Therefore, what I've found works really well is to tune the kick so that it sits away from the bass notes and this enabled me to get a kick with more low-end weight as I can see exactly where to locate it as SPAN will show you the gaps in the frequency spectrum as you just can't rely on placement by using a "note to frequency" conversion because of harmonics.  I've noted that producers who do tune their kicks to the root note, often resort to ducking the bass or even ensuring that the bass and kick are offset in time so that they don't clash!
 
Fourthly, then there's the high-end of the kick, the tap or smack of the skin as opposed to the thump and again I've analysed a number of productions and some use a mid-frequency tap for this whereas others use a high-frequency click to cut through the mix.  Again SPAN can show you where the peaks are in the kick so you can always put a slight +1 to 2 db push on that frequency just so it cuts through the mix.
 
Mostly, as I do electronica these days, I create my own kick as I find it quicker and easier than running through a load of presets and finding that later, it get's lost in the mix and I have to trawl through a load of presets again!  This way I know exactly what to alter to get my kick punch through the mix.  Saying that, I don't like a big top-end click on my kick so I normally have it much more subtle but that's personal preference.
 
Good luck and hopefully something in my post may help and sorry if I've told you how to suck eggs.
 
Cheers, Rick.

Rick, Thanks for taking time to provide this thoughtful reply.  Good information!  All the advice here has been helpful. And yes, I do tend towards organic now, but I have a lot of background in electronic music and I love it. 
 
By the way, I appreciate all the help from my brothers and sisters on the forum on kick and bass; but if anyone wanted to say how awesome The Mighty Konrad's patented Strat sound is (chords on the choruses and lines on the bridge), it wouldn't make me mad.

Hi Konrad, sorry for the late reply to this, since I kept seeing this thread on my phone and it is too painful to try to insert a link on it. When I did the Coursera course on Intro to Music Production, I happened to pick a song that had the kick thump and bass fundamental at the same frequency for a "Mirror EQ" presentation. Previous posts in this thread cover a lot of this detail; and Craig hit upon the psychoacoustic effect of "missing fundamental," as the solution in this case was to put a healthy notch in the bass to let the kick through. Mentally we perceive the frequency difference between overtones (i.e. the fundamental frequency) and "hear" this even if it is gone completely.
 
Here is a link to that presentation (pdf format).
 
Here is a quick and dirty on ducking from another week in that course. This was done with Alloy2 to knock down residual vocal artifacts from a karaoke track.

Thanks, Michael.

Michael, Your presentation is very good.  I am familiar with the general principles, but was just having some issues getting mixes that translated well—and I do not use the same kick and bass in every song and the songs, while all sounding like they came form the same person, are each a bit different.  I also have a somewhat unique style that is sort of a train wreck between Broadway and country, with some Beatles influence and unusual vocals.   I think I have the mixes under control now.  Thanks.