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This question is more production in general than strictly dubstep. I recently decided o do a lift of Eminem's Lose Yourself just for fun. The main kick is a heavy 808 just like in the real song. I recorded my bass guitar part and felt that in the original song there was a low sub bass that just carried the entire song throughout. Instead of going for a synth and using the sine wave technique, I tuned my bass guitar's E string to a low D, recorded that, then ran it through a low pass filter. On my speakers at home it sounded great but when I played it on my friend system, the entire low end was just a muffled mess. Basically im just wondering, is it necessary to have a sub-bass when your drums are using deep 808 kicks?

What you could do is layer the 808s so there's one for punch and one for sub, then tune the sub one to make the bass line. You could also use a 808 sub and just highpass the bass guitar. Oooooooor, highpass the 808 and use the bass guitar for the sub. Your best bet would be to work on the arrangement though, make sure the 808 sub and the sub bass are never playing at the same time.

lots of tracks just use big 808 kicks for subs, nothing wrong with that

Depends on the song really. You could keep the true sub freqs at 20-70Hz in the bass guitar then scoop EQ (Cut out everything in a scooping motion between the frequencies you want to keep. 100Hz to 5KHz for instance) so the kick has the main dominance over the bass, but the bass has that low-end drive that you were mentioning.
EQing is everything - if you want the bass and the 808 kick in the track then you just need to EQ properly to make them both fit.

There's a few other things to consider though - maybe your friend's system just couldn't handle the frequencies, maybe, if you exported it, the exportion messed up, maybe the environment was terrible etc.

Hope some of that helps

Looooooooooooooove 808 kicks !.
And yes as the above poster says EQing is everything !.

To make life easier you could use a free Spectrum Analizer to help get your frequencies in check.

Mark-Creda wrote:Looooooooooooooove 808 kicks !.
And yes as the above poster says EQing is everything !.

To make life easier you could use a free Spectrum Analizer to help get your frequencies in check.

dunno if i want that... esp free

Don't let the fact that It's free put you off.
This is a very useful tool

http://www.voxengo.com/product/span/