Get Fooled Mix

[Cwidener7]

I don't have any particularly technical approach for low end (nor the expertize/monitoring to do so) but I stick to a routine and then play adlib:
my bass and kickdrum go to a bus I call "LOW" with a Bus plugin (Sonimus Britson Bus) in it. I set bass fader until it's doing a steady -18dB RMS in the Bus plugin's VU. Then I sketchely tweak kick's balance and from then on, I'll hardly touch bass fader again, it's all "LOW" bus fader, except for a now and then slight movement to the kick's fader to sweet the balance between them. I'm a sucker for slight, organic ducking compression, but almost never I'll do it with bass, though it's a pretty common trick (ducking bass with the kick, I mean).

All the other parts of the drumkit go to a "DRUMS" bus and then those two buses go to a "RHYTHM" bus. It's easy to mute guitars and imagine a verse that's only bass/drums, so I'll set the lowend and rhythm and then bring guitars in. The sparser the arrangement, the more lowend guitars can have. With this mix, I've used a mid/side EQ in the guitars bus to shelve down the lowend in the mid channel so it leaves place for the "LOW" bus. Sometimes I set that mid low EQ sidechained to the bass track (or the "LOW" bus), especially when the bass part is more legato.

I have little option but to do as if I trusted my monitoring (headphones with a correction plugin) because I just cannot make any sense out of "spectographs" or whatever.

Thanks for taking the time to give such detailed advice! I've heard of ducking on the bass/kick and guitar/vocals but have never tried it. I think I'll have to practice it on my next mix.....