If you’ve got the funds, it’s always best to get your mixes finalised by a professional mastering engineer if you can. That said, with so many powerful, easy to use and affordable plugins dedicated to mastering on the market, there’s certainly no reason not to give it a go yourself. Here are some things to bear in mind if you take the DIY route. 

1. Make sure the mix is actually ready for mastering

You’d think this would go without saying, but there’s still a misconception among many producers that minor oversights at the mixing stage can be somehow ’fixed in the master’. As mastering should never involve heavy-handed remodelling of any kind, this is almost never the case; and given that you can have that mix open in your DAW in seconds, and the issue itself corrected in perhaps minutes, there’s really no excuse for not tackling it at the source, rather than attempting to compensate for problematic individual elements within the mix using a mastering EQ or compressor.

Of course, if you’re mastering someone else’s track, or the mix was made using gear you no longer have access to, you’ll need to either jump through the necessary hoops to get the offending element sorted out, or work around it as best as you can. If it’s something that’s crucial for the effectiveness of the track as a whole, though – a badly EQ’d vocal, say, or wildly unbalanced drum mix – don’t kid yourself into thinking that the latter option is workable when deep down you know it isn’t.

2. Don’t skimp on monitoring

Just as with mixing, the quality of your monitor speakers (and possibly headphones), and your familiarity with their character and response, will be central to the success of your mastering endeavours. So, if you have money to spend on your studio and your monitoring isn’t up to snuff, make improving it the priority before investing in any other area.

Having said that, it’s also essential to reference your masters on as many real-world ’consumer’ playback systems as possible: Echo/Homepod-style smart speakers, phone, laptop, car, TV, soundbar, etc. Yes, it’s a depressing thing to have to do, but that’s 21st Century living for you.

3. Choose the right loudness standard(s)

Before you dive into your master, you should know what streaming platform it’s going to end up on (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc) and set your metering and/or limiter up to target that platform’s particular loudness standard. If you don’t, you leave your track to the whims of an automated re-levelling process that may well prove detrimental to the sound.

Although it’s perfectly possible to shoot for a given loudness target using any LUFS-capable metering system, there are a few excellent limiting and metering plugins available that can be calibrated specifically to all the standards you’re likely to need, including Signum Audio’s Bute Loudness Suite and iZotope’s Insight 2.

It’s likely that you’ll be uploading to more than one streaming service, too, but once you’ve got your EQ dialled in, adjusting the limiter and exporting a separate master for each one should be straightforward enough.

4. Compare to a reference track

Just as you would A/B reference a mix-in-progress with a commercial release in order to prevent perceptual accommodation taking you down the wrong path, you should also occasionally compare your master to a track (or tracks, if you can mentally juggle more than one at a time) that you aspire to get it sounding like in general terms. Obviously, this track needs to be in the same genre and feature similar instrumentation and styling to your project, and should be in the highest quality format you can get your hands on – ie, not MP3. Also, be sure to match the levels of your master and reference material, so that any disparity in perceived loudness doesn’t colour your perception.

Once again, there are plugins out there that can aid you in this department. Adaptr Audio’s Metric AB and Mastering The Mix’s Reference facilitate switching between reference tracks and your own mix at the click of a virtual button; while iZotope’s Tonal Balance Control 2 lets you compare the frequency profile of your mix with that of any imported track or 12 genre-based presets.

5. Keep your monitoring level in check

Before you get properly into a master, start by setting the monitoring volume to a level at which you can clearly hear everything in the mix but run no risk of ear fatigue – ie, moderately loud. With mastering being such a speedy process (see below), it’s important that you then don’t touch the volume knob again, so as to maintain a consistent perspective on any changes you’re making, apart from occasional dramatic but brief lowering or raising to hear how the track sounds very quietly (often hugely revealing!) or very loud (an important consideration for dance music especially).

Related to this, remember to collapse the mix down to mono from time to time while mastering, to check that playback will translate well to club PAs, phones (urgh…) and other single-channel setups. 

6. Don’t hang about

In the grand scheme of music production things, mastering is relatively simple in its workflow and operational technicalities, with just a single chain of processors to negotiate and – ideally – all the hard work already done at the mixing stage. What makes a mastering engineer such an indispensable resource is not just their experientially developed ‘golden ears’ and objectivity, but also the ability to hear the bigger picture at all times and not get bogged down in over-analysis of sonic minutiae that don’t really matter.

Key to all of this is knowing how to quickly – indeed, almost instinctively – assess the sound of a mix and what needs to be done to finalise it, and making your tweaks fast, before your rational brain has the chance to take over and compromise your aesthetic judgment. If it takes you more than an hour to master a track, you’re probably overthinking it.

Share your go-to mastering techniques and tricks in the comments.

Main image by Troy T on Unsplash