Before you start

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Mastering is the final creative and technical stage before your music reaches a listener. It's not magic. It's not a mysterious dark art reserved for people with £50,000 monitor setups. It's EQ, compression, limiting, and metering — applied with restraint to a finished mix.

The goal is simple: make the mix translate across every playback system, hit the right loudness for your target platform, and do no harm in the process. This guide covers the full chain, step by step.

What You'll Need

A finished stereo mix (bounced to WAV or AIFF, 24-bit, at your session's sample rate)
A clean monitoring environment — doesn't need to be perfect, but you need to trust what you're hearing
An EQ (parametric, ideally linear-phase for mastering)
A compressor
A limiter (true peak capable)
A loudness meter (LUFS)

FabFilter Pro-L 2

£170

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Youlean Loudness Meter

Free

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If any of those terms are unfamiliar, start with the compression and EQ entries in the encyclopaedia.

Step 1 — Prepare the Mix

Before you touch a mastering plugin, get the mix right.

Bounce your stereo mix with at least 3–6 dB of headroom — peaks no higher than −3 dBFS. This gives your mastering chain room to work. If your mix bus has a limiter on it, take it off. The mastering limiter handles that job.

Export at your session's native sample rate and bit depth. If you need to convert bit depth, dither to 24-bit. Don't dither twice — only dither once, at the final stage.

If the mix isn't right, no amount of mastering will fix it. Go back and fix the mix. Mastering is polish, not reconstruction.

Step 2 — Reference Tracks

Load 2–3 commercially released tracks in a similar genre into your session. This is non-negotiable.

Level-match them to your mix. This is critical — louder always sounds "better" to the human ear. If your reference is 4 dB louder than your mix, you'll think it sounds better even if it doesn't. Pull the reference level down until it sits at roughly the same perceived loudness as your unmastered mix.

Compare throughout the entire process:

Tonal balance — does your mix have the same general brightness and warmth?
Width — does the stereo image feel similar?
Dynamics — does your mix breathe the same way, or is it noticeably more or less compressed?

References keep you honest. Without them, you're guessing.

Step 3 — EQ

Mastering EQ is about broad, gentle moves. You're adjusting the overall tonal balance, not carving out space for individual instruments — that's the mix engineer's job.

High-pass below 30 Hz if there's sub-bass rumble. Most playback systems can't reproduce it, and it eats headroom.

Correct tonal imbalances:

Too muddy? Cut 200–400 Hz, gently.
Lacking air? A gentle shelf above 10 kHz.
Harsh upper mids? A dip around 2–4 kHz, but tread carefully.

Keep moves between 0.5–2 dB. If you find yourself cutting or boosting more than 3 dB, the mix needs fixing, not mastering. Go back and address the problem at the source.

Use wide Q values. Narrow surgical cuts have no place in a mastering EQ.

Step 4 — Compression

Gentle. That's the word. If you can hear the compressor working, you've gone too far.

Ratio: 1.5:1 to 2:1
Attack: Slow — 30 ms or more. You want transients through.
Release: Auto or medium. Match it to the tempo if you can.
Gain reduction: 1–2 dB. That's it.

The goal is subtle glue and density — pulling the mix together slightly, making it feel more cohesive. Not obvious pumping, not squashed dynamics.

Many mastering engineers skip compression entirely if the mix doesn't need it. If the mix already has good dynamic control from the mix bus, adding more compression just damages it. Don't compress for the sake of it.

Step 5 — Limiting

The limiter is where you set your final loudness. It's also where most beginners do the most damage.

Set the ceiling to −1.0 dBTP (true peak). This ensures no inter-sample peaks clip during conversion to lossy formats like MP3 or AAC. Every streaming platform expects this.

Push the threshold (or input gain, depending on your limiter) down until you reach your target loudness:

Spotify: −14 LUFS integrated
Apple Music: −16 LUFS integrated
YouTube: −14 LUFS integrated
General streaming safe zone: −14 LUFS

Watch for distortion. If your limiter is doing more than 3–4 dB of gain reduction, you're pushing too hard. The mix will start to distort, transients will flatten, and the whole thing will sound smaller, not louder. Back off.

Check your loudness target →

Step 6 — Metering

Don't master with your eyes, but do check the meters. They confirm what your ears are telling you — or flag what they're missing.

Check these four things before you bounce:

Integrated LUFS — should match your platform target (−14 or −16 LUFS)
True peak — must not exceed your ceiling (−1.0 dBTP)
Stereo correlation — should stay positive. Negative values mean phase issues that will cause problems in mono playback
Frequency spectrum — compare to your references. Any obvious holes or buildups?

If the numbers look right and it sounds right against your references, you're done. Don't keep tweaking.

Common Mistakes

Mastering a bad mix. The single most common mistake. If the mix has problems — muddy low end, harsh vocals, no low-end control — fix the mix first. Mastering cannot rescue a bad mix. It can only make a good mix slightly better.

Over-processing. Every plugin you add is a chance to make things worse. If the mix sounds good, do less. Some of the best mastering sessions involve barely touching the audio.

Not using references. Without a reference, you have no anchor. You'll drift — usually towards too bright, too loud, or too bass-heavy.

Mastering louder than the platform target. If Spotify normalises to −14 LUFS and you master to −8 LUFS, your track just gets turned down. You've sacrificed dynamics for nothing. The loud track ends up sounding worse than the one mastered to −14 with its dynamics intact.

Mastering in a bad room. If you can't trust what you're hearing, you can't make good decisions. At minimum, learn your room's problems and compensate. Better yet, invest in basic treatment. Headphones can work as a reference check, but they shouldn't be your only monitoring.

When to Hire a Mastering Engineer

DIY mastering is fine for demos, personal releases, and learning the craft. But if the project matters commercially — a single you're pitching, an album you're releasing properly, anything with a budget behind it — hire someone.

A fresh pair of ears in a calibrated room is worth the investment. A good mastering engineer hears things you've gone deaf to after weeks of mixing. They have monitoring you don't have. They have experience across thousands of projects you don't have.

It doesn't have to cost a fortune. Many excellent mastering engineers charge £30–80 per track. That's a small price for getting it right.