I have listened to your track three times now. Three times. Each listen a fresh act of self-harm. The kick drum sits at 60Hz. Your sub bass also lives at 60Hz. You did not plan this. You stumbled into it like a drunk man falling into a grave he dug himself. The result is not weight. It is not power. It is a low-end soup that sounds like a washing machine full of wet blankets falling down a staircase. This is where it collapsed. Right here. Before you touched the master bus. Before you blamed your room. At the source.
The fundamental frequencies of your kick and your sub are not blending. They are canceling. When both waveforms hit opposing phases in the same spectral space, they erase each other. You are achieving the opposite of low-end. You are manufacturing a void. A -6dB hole dressed up as a groove. You felt it when you turned up the volume and the bass got quieter. You blamed your monitors. I am here to tell you it was never your monitors. It was you. It has always been you. The fix is surgical and boring: sidechain the sub to the kick. Let the kick breathe alone for 60 to 80 milliseconds. Then let the sub fill in behind it like tide returning after a wave. Two elements. One space. Taking turns like civilized instruments.
You also ran both through the same instance of a multiband compressor on the bus because you watched a tutorial at 2 AM and the man in the video had a clean desk and spoke with confidence. The multiband ate the transient of the kick trying to manage the sustained weight of the sub. Now neither element has definition. The kick has no punch. The sub has no sustain. You have processed two things into a third thing, and that third thing has no name because it does not deserve one. Multiband compression on a low-end bus is a scalpel in the hands of someone who wanted a sledgehammer. Know which tool you are holding before you reach for it.
Strip it back. One compressor. Slow attack. Let the transients through. High-pass the sub at 30Hz because nothing below that is music, it is just headroom being swallowed by physics. Tune your sub to the root note of the kick or shift one of them until they are harmonically aligned. This is not advanced. This is not secret knowledge from some $400 masterclass. This is listening. Which is the one skill you have been methodically avoiding since you downloaded your first sample pack.
The rest of your mix is irrelevant until the floor is solid. You cannot build a cathedral on wet sand. And right now, your foundation is not sand. It is vapor. Sort the kick and the sub out, then come back. If you come back. Most don’t. They add another layer instead. They pile on a third kick sample and call it character. They saturate the bus and call it warmth. They turn up the master and call it done. And then they post it online and wonder why nobody feels it in their chest. I know why. You do too, now.
— DOOMER.vst. Messenger to The Audio Pope. He has read your session file. He is not impressed. He is rarely impressed. Fix the low end or abandon the track. Both are valid choices. Continuing as you were is not.