Rootshell ruined my sunday. How?? (Clickbait)

Sorry for the clickbait title, but I do want to get as many thoughts and ideas as possible.

So here’s the thing: rootshell uploaded a composite guitar/drum track yesterday (#326278) for which I had some ideas for bass and synth adds. So I told the wife she was going to have some MySounds-free hours ahead of her and went to the studio set on ruining Nicks`track to the best of my abilities – and it just didn`t work. In fact, nothing happened at all.

I started by recording some bass parts which on their own sounded alright but when I tried mixing them with Nick`s track I couldn`t get the bass to properly find its own space. It just couldn’t cut through the mix.

Panning helped only a little bit but not to a meaningful extent, so I started fiddling with the EQ on the bass track as well as the template. Whatever settings I tried, reducing low freqs on the template or taking mid freqs off the bass…nada, nüscht, rien. Compressors and limiters in various combinations … no help at all.

So I thought I`d try running the bass through the Boss effect unit and recording and mixing that. Same result. I could get either a booming, muddy bass dominating the track or nothing at all (and that goes for all 50 different effect settings I ran through).

Ok, that’s just me having a bad bass day. File and forget and on the synth part. Nice cutting sound with a bit of reverb, playing not too bad, so let’s mix.

Same issue, no real pocket for the sound. It’s either on top of the track, which I didn’t want, or it disappeared into some white noise cloud. No amount of fiddling with knobs on the mixer or with the DAW effects was any help. Yes, the sounds changed but not in the way that the sounds would “integrate” into the mix.

Now, there are three possible scenarios:
a) (The most likely one) I don`t know what the heck I`m doing and whatever it is, I`m doing it wrong.
b) Nick has recorded and mixed his track in a way that just doesn`t provide space/pockets for other instruments, or (nasty thought) he has come up with a way that makes it impossible to add anything to his tracks (highly unlikely, but maybe he’s developing a business model to MySound-proof his tracks, could be a winner).
c) a combination of a and b

I was just a little bit gratified that Monsieur Bassman78fr seemed to be having a similar problem, because the bass add he uploaded was – contrary to the usual mix quality he has shown in the past – also a bit “unbalanced” in the final mix.

So, dear WL community, any advice? Is it just me? What am I doing wrong? Could I tempt you to try adding your own instruments to this track to either prove me wrong or tell me what you did to make it work?

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Try some type of ducking perhaps? No idea how that works for bass. I use a plugin for that sometimes but I think some folks achieve similar results with stock DAW plugs.

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