Thank you gentlemen!
Dan R: With drums, it's a live kit quite massively augmented with it's own samples. When it comes to 220bpm you can rarely keep things live in a punchy and clear modern mix. I spent a day tuning drummer's kit and micing things up. The room we were tracking in was a dry mid-sized room, and I used five overhead mics and only one Shure SM-7b stuck in an old double-bass in the middle of the room
Sometimes you just need to act weird.
I used "parallel comp" smashed samples of the kit, too. And also smashed "overhead" samples on snare and toms to bring up that dry room. Funny thing: you still need a lot of room, even if it is a dry room, to let drums sound as one kit.
With bass, the bass player used Warwick Thumb bolt-on, it's a very mid-forward instrument with lots of character. I mainly used a clean DI signal, intensively equalized and compressed in several stages: a bit of 1176-like comp, a bit of multiband compression and some limiting in the end. Before the limiter, we chose to blend that DI signal with a tiny bit of midrangey guitar crunch to help it cut through guitars (but I automated that crunch a lot, we didn't want it to be too obvious) and then - parallel tape-like oversaturation that really helped it sound clean and soft, but still preserve all the details within a busy mix.
MartijnPaauwe: Oh yes, I do agree on that! That's what we elected to sacrifice to bring up the clean-sounding bass. You know how it works sometimes. If you need to make an accent on a massive bass and in-your-face snare, some other elements may lose it's dominant role. But if you bring them up, you may need to bring those vocals up a tiny bit, then add a tad more overheads, and all of a sudden your bass has lost it's role the band was aiming for.
