It can be tricky to accurately hear bottom end in near field environments.

Whilst transients are clear they can often be misleading as to what’s really going on.

Whilst it’s always good to use your ears and go with feeling it doesn’t hurt to use meters to help guide you. In this instance I would recommend using RMS to balance the levels in conjunction with a scope to view the waveform in realtime.

This way you can visually match the body of the kick drum with the bass line.

Measuring in RMS also helps balance overall energy rather than getting thrown off by peak levels which will show all the transient level details rather than volume.