There's no way around it, you're going to have some level of compensation in the mix in order to achieve what you want to achieve.

The mix is the reference point that you set your song in, so you do gain some intuition as to what it is and how you want things to sound like given enough understanding of layers, DAW techniques, and handling of proper signal flow.

I recently found out that, mastering does have a hand in making the average loudness of the track bang much more harder than that in the mix.



Considering those points above the conclusion is this:You need to be using sounds that are of the particular variety that you want to best emulate (before you know how to make your own in that style), understanding that the mix does set the way your master will sound, The master will raise the average level of your track.

You might need to look into more subtle understanding of your signal processing techniques (and others as well given a particular problem you're having), get more of a technical understanding of you DAW and how it works and what it can do, dive more deeply into mix decisions and considerations when thinking about your mix and desired sound output (with respect to signal flow and technical understanding of daw)

I typically do one of two things:
1. Before composing the beat, I think about what instruments I want to use, and through process of elimination and frequency knowledge try to take out instruments that will consistently battle for space, aka, frequency sharing … Or,
2. If I already composed the track without the elimination process, I just open up EQ's and carve out unwanted frequencies.

Hope this helps.

Best ways are to either using sidechain compression, subtle enveloping or subtle sample delay. That's just from personal experience anyway.

Another option, similar to what Tentroic said, is to use a volume shaper of some sort to manually duck the audio of your bass every time the kick drum hits. There are a few ways to do this outside of using a compressor, and depending upon your source audio you might not even want to use one anyways!

A compressor is designed to replace an audio engineer manually riding the volume fader on a track. When working with traditional drum recordings, no two kicks will ever sound completely identical because the drummer isn't a machine and can't strike the beater with the same force or timing each hit - so you'll need a processing solution that can compensate for these types of things. That's where a compressor comes in. If you're using a sampled kick drum, or a kick drum made inside a synthesizer like Kick 2, you'll have a perfect recreation of the same sound, every single time, without fail. Why go through all the work of a compressor, when you know how long the tail will be and can take that into account?

There are solutions that can do this for you, like the Trackspacer that hennyhuisman mentioned, or like Peak Rider. If you're not interested in spending that much money, Kickstart is a fantastic and simplified version of one of the solutions I'm about to recommend - It's only $15 USD, and can run either synced to a specific beat value or (with a little finagling) respond to MIDI input! I actually use Kickstart in a lot of my house, trance, and techno tunes because of how quick and easy it is to just slap on, tweak for ten seconds then move on to the rest of my project.

If you're willing to pay the money, my personal suggestions are either VolumeShaper - the big brother of Kickstart - or LFOTool, which is perfect for doing sidechaining but ALSO is a very full featured LFO source for modulating other synthesizers within your DAW.

And if you wanna do it the free way, you can always use Ableton's Utility, Fruity Balance, or whatever other gain control plugin you want to draw in your own volume automation curve and manually create, copy, and paste your ducking as you see fit!

There are a few big things I have learned over time that helped me to get my kick and bass to sound "big":

A: Make sure your kick is in key (the frequency of the kick drum should ~usually~ be the 3rd or 5th note in the given key your song was written in.
B: ***Pick the right kick sample*** This will take you eons farther than trying to compress and EQ the shit out of a sample that doesn't even belong in the first place.
C: Make sure your sub bass and kick are ~usually~ never playing simultaneously. I'll usually use some form of sidechain compression for the rest of the elements to duck them out of the way of the kick but as for the bass, I'll have the note start something like 1/8th note after the transient of the kick. If the kick is in key with your bass, it'll just sound like really clean side chain compression.

Another thing that helps a ton is to add harmonics to your sub bass. If you just have a sine wave playing underneath everything else, you'll often times hear a disconnect between sub bass and low mids. Adding some distortion onto your sub bass will add more harmonics and make it sound "bigger"

Hope this helps!