It also matters what you play. Here’s two songs, both with drums and bass guitar as a song intro.
Imagine Dragons, Radioactive:
RX Bandits, Will You Be Tomorrow
OK, the RXB Intro is “quieter”, but my gosh they’re not mangling the signal!
RXB Recorded their album, from a PledgeMusic funded campaign in a few weeks.
I ‘scoped these myself, straight off the back of my amp because I had been wondering why Radioactive sounded so weird.
So – maybe Hi-End won’t make your shitty recordings bearable.