Hey Tambe! Welcome to the world of audio recording, mixing and overall production.
I know it’s not right to tell anyone about how one can do mixes or production, but maybe this can help you.
Preceding the volume levels would be the quality of recordings I’ve accomplished during the tracking phase. Assuming we all use quality nearfield monitors, we can hear how we want the guitar, kick, snare, bass and other instruments to sound.
I listen to the raw version and from there do some volume balancing. You’ll notice the unnatural volumes especially when you want the kick to be emphasized. More on this later.
For me, I usually have the shell volumes a bit louder than the guitar especially if these are distorted/driven guitars. I usually align the bass frequencies of the bass instrument to the bass harmonic of the kick drum.
Mostly, I just do basic panning for rock music. If there’s two guitars, pan one left and pan one right. Then adjust their volumes accordingly if they’re a bit louder than your drumkit, adjust their volume again. Pan your drum instruments as you imagine their distances in real life.
I usually place the bass in the center to ensure its energy never falters. Having two channels power the bass frequencies is indeed standard for my mixes.
For example, I am recording palm-muted, chugging metal guitar riffs and the tone I recorded had too much bass, it’s fighting against the bass guitar and bass drum. So that’s when I need to carve out some interfering frequencies.
A bell-shaped eq can do wonders so long as you adjust the bandwidth ever so often. Aim to reduce, not to increase, frequencies. As I said, carving out.
A rule of thumb I have is never compromise an instrument’s sound character over clarity. If your guitar sounds weird with a huge high-pass filter on the bass freqs, it’s not worth it for the mix. It loses energy in the process too.
Your kick drum’s bass levels sound fairly decent. However, you want to emphasize a certain frequency that would create that loud kick drum we hear so often. So boost it in the frequencies where you need it, I would say.
If it were a metal kick, I’d raise the treble in the eq a bit while pushing down the compressor’s threshold with a relatively great starting compression ratio of 4.1 for kick drums.
Compression ratio rule of thumb (for me): higher ratios: more bang, less dynamics
lower ratios: better for fast-reaction compression attacks and release.