What I do when layering kicks and snares is a bit complex but it does wonders.
Lets say I have a kick and a snare, I would make a ghost channel for both. So I'd take the transients of both, put them on their own channel and mute the output. This gives me the kick channel, the snare channel, the ghost kick channel and the ghost snare channel.
Then I sidechain the snare channel to the ghost kick, so the kick's transient will punch through instead of being washed away by the snare's transient. At the same time, I sidechain the kick by the snare's ghost channel. However, I only sidechain away the frequency in the kick, where the snare's fundamental frequency is.
Doing this, u make room for the kicks thump (the fundamental frequency) in the kick, and u make room for the kicks transient.
https://soundcloud.com/milesdominic/mako
https://soundcloud.com/milesdominic/in-retrospect-free-dl
these are 2 examples where i used that technique.
ok instead of getting complicated and convoluted, what you can do is just adjust the attack time of the samples that you use when all of your layers are played together.
You can also nudge things a little before or after, i tend to do things after because music is going forward and behind the pocket isn't so bad.
I have quite a few kick and snare layers, but the principle applies to just having a kick and a snare.
You just adjust the attack of the snare drum every so slightly, so that when you do combine the kick and snare together the transients are being applied at different times, and it'll sound like one.
You gotta take into time differences with this as well as frequency perspective.
You should also take that to hear when creating sounds with synths and cymbals.
EDIT:in front of the pocket but in MS it doesn't really matter
