trouble taming the kick

How was it recorded back then, straight to cassette, a "ghetto blaster" sort of deal? If so, there won't be much you can do. Many portable cassette recorders of that period had AGC, Automatic Gain Control. It was a very hard limiter, not designed for subtlety. You may wish to find a multi-band compressor (I use ), and see if you can set frequency ratios to "expand" some of the rest of the program material. That may help somewhat, but this is a "polishing the turd" situation. Hissy tape, the rest of the band was further away from the mic than the drummer, lots of room echo. Good luck. edit: IQ4 is Win VST only, if that works for you.

I know how bad these tapes were, I'm just trying to rescue what I can from them. We had a fun band back then. Anyway, I ran them thru that AAMS auto mastering and they showed improvement without a lot of time invested in the process, but this one particular party has that dominant kick. I went back to the files I have pre-AAMS and was sliding a eq filter up and down the freqs trying to find the kick but didn't have much luck. Something I'll have to live with on these I guess... It was an old JVC boom box by the way, and yes with the limiting built in and always on. And this party was in a big apartment party room with a good sized crowd and the recorder just stuck where I could find a spot.. Thanks for the responses though.

did you try Span to find out where exactly the kick does the kick frequencywise? and then use ReaEq to tame it surgically down? (or any other appropriate eq ...)

i used melda manalyzer.. but it's kind of a jumble down in that range so it's hard to pick out just the kick... i'll keep hunting

You can do it with clip automation - 4-point evelope editing for each offending kick. A bit of dynamic eq could help to tame some offending low-mid frequencies too, but that is another story! ;) Have a listen to the attached file (inside the zip there is an mp3 file)