With the latest generation of high-end plugins putting a wealth of supremely powerful mastering tools in the hands of any producer with a few hundred quid to spare, there’s nothing stopping you from producing pristine masters in the comfort of your own studio. Here are some tips to help you get them over the line.

Keep Mixing And Mastering Separate

The rise of genuinely viable mastering plugins in recent years has led to the increasingly common workflow of running a mastering chain on the two-bus while mixing. Although there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, the traditionalist in us can’t help but recommend keeping the two processes discrete and sequential: mix, then master.

There are several reasons for this. First, the skillsets and mental approaches required for mixing and mastering are very different, as the former is all about adjusting and balancing the many individual elements of the track relative to each other in order to shape a cohesive and appealing mix, while mastering is essentially a final stage of subtle processing of the bounced stereo (or surround) mix in order to elevate it to ‘release quality’. Second, it’s good to take a break between finishing the mix and mastering it, as it gives your ears the chance to reset, enabling you to come at the master refreshed and with greater objectivity and perspective – leave it a few days if you can.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, you might actually be better off handing the mix to someone else for mastering, which we’ll come back to shortly…

Handle Dynamics And EQ With Care, And Return To The Mix If Necessary

The main technical difference between mixing and mastering is the way in which compression/limiting and equalisation are applied at each stage. Mixing places no bounds on the extremity and depth of the compressor and EQ settings that can be dialled in, but mastering always requires a very delicate touch with regard to both, since all those major changes must already be baked into the mix, thereby making any further heavy-handed tweaking more likely to do harm than good. So, if you find yourself pushing your mastering compressor beyond about a 2:1 ratio in order to bed that pokey vocal or kick drum in sufficiently, or cutting/boosting by more than 1dB (2dB at a push) in any frequency range, you may need to rewind your process and fix those issues in the mix, where you can address the offending elements individually, instead.

Don’t Hesitate To Automate

Automation generally comes into play at the mixing stage, where it’s used to imbue a track with dynamism, movement and change over time – but there’s no reason why it can’t also be employed during mastering, should the need arise. Manipulating volume to compensate for brief jumps or dips in the mix is standard practise, while a slight (ie, 1dB or less) increase in limiter input gain or stereo width (via the level of the ‘sides’ signal) in the chorus can up the energy at that point nicely, to give a couple of examples.

Always Use Reference Tracks

Just as it is at the mixing stage, comparing your master in progress to a commercially released track that you love the sound of, and that sits within the same genre and production styling, is absolutely essential for all but the most experienced and confident mastering engineers – and even they will probably keep doing it anyway.

How you facilitate this will depend on your choice of mastering application – DAW or dedicated audio editor – but whether you place your reference on a track at the top of the arrange page, control it within a plugin such as Adaptr Audio’s Metric AB or Mastering The Mix’s Reference, or just run it in a separate media player, do make sure it’s a high quality render (WAV or AIFF, not MP3), and level-matched to your master so that neither sounds ‘better’ than the other just by dint of being louder.

Check Your Master On A Wide Range Of Speakers

The diversity of potential playback platforms that your masters need to effectively cater to these days is immense, from high-end hi-fis and in-car systems, through smart speakers, laptops, tablets and soundbars, to all manner of headphones and earbuds. Obviously, it’s not possible to check a master on every possible listening device, but you should certainly be testing on all those you have to hand, across as broad a qualitative spectrum as possible, and going back to the drawing board to address any major frequency- or imaging-related issues that might become apparent on any of them. Alternatively, Audified’s MixChecker Pro simulates various consumer devices in a convenient plugin.

Needless to say, you’ll also want to check that your master still sounds great once it’s been reduced from that beautiful 24-bit/96kHz WAV file to CD-quality, as well as MP4, AAC, FLAC and all the other streaming formats. Of course, there’s not really much you can do about the inevitable minor artefacts that come with audio compression, but, happily, the average listener won’t notice those anyway.

Don’t Do It Yourself!

While there’s no doubt that the likes of iZotope Ozone, Brainworx bx_masterdesk and Eventide Elevate Mastering Bundle are more than up to the job of rendering masters of excellent quality, there’s far more to the art of mastering than just the gear you use to do it. It takes a ton of experience to establish yourself as a truly competent mastering engineer, so until you reach that point, if you really care about the music you make, you should instead get any mixes that you consider to be important mastered by a reputable professional.

Whether you physically take your mix to a mastering studio, or call on an online mastering service such as those offered by Metropolis and Abbey Road, outsourcing this vital final stage in your musical labour of love will always be money well spent. The difference that a skilled mastering engineer – not to mention the absurdly expensive hardware they’ll have at their disposal – can make to a mix can be nothing short of profound.

As for AI-driven mastering solutions such as Landr, eMastered and AI Mastering, while these can yield surprisingly effective results, we probably wouldn’t recommend using them for anything more serious than demos or rough masters.

What techniques do you draw on to get your masters sounding as good as they possibly can? Let us know in the comments.