Quote Originally Posted by Basil Rush
compression is very important. even a touch of it transforms a kick drum from flabby to tight and punchy. sometimes things sound sweeter if you cut some bottom mid 400-800hz (ish) then compress ...

maxbass from waves can make a very full and middy sound if you want that ... often a bit too much though you can also add the bottom octave with it too (use the dies bassum preset for a starter) ...

filtering or eqing out most of what's going on below about 30-60hz can often help too. probably best done before the compressor though if it sounds better the other way around then whatever ...

make sure your compressor release time is set such that the compressor returns to 0db gain reduction inbetween each kick otherwise your first kick drum will sound different from all the others ...

you probably don't need the gain reduction meters to be reading much more than 6-8db of cut or so normally otherwise the attack of the sound will be way in your face. (at 6db of reduction the attack will start about twice as loud as the rest of the kick sound ...)

also make sure you have the kick as audio in your track even if it starts off in a software sampler you probably want to record one and then move it around with the mouse till it's dead on the beat. check that the phase of the kick is good, that the inital peak is in the up direction (speaker cones slapping you in the face) and that it's a good attack, edit any crap off the start ...

if you are layering kick drums timing differences can make the sound completely different - if you are triggering from a sampler layered kicks will sound different every time - this will suck for repeative fast beats so either record loads of different ones and pick the one you like or record the layers seperately and sort them out on some audio tracks where there won't be any timing issues.
this is really well described basil. all i would really add to this is experiment sidechaining the kick and bass - also turn up parts of the freq on both kick and bass on a highq and mess to find a nice sitting point. i also like to have two potential sub bass lines from the start - can be really useful when getting confused about what sounds good ie flick between them both, sometimes i'll even end up using both together. oh and that waves soundshaper on the subs proves useful in cubase for me to mess with pitch on audio bass.