3 Tips for preparing your mix for mastering

Audiotent Tip 321. Here are three tips before you send your track to get mastered.

1) Make sure you don’t apply any limiting or any form of loudness enhancement on your mix. The mastering engineer will have the right tools and experience to get your music louder in the least destructive way.

2) Watch out for clipping. Play the mix on your DAW from beginning to an end. Keep watching the meters on the main output. You want to leave around 3-6 dB of headroom before you commit the project to audio. Most importantly, don’t let the peaks hit/clip above 0dBFS. Clipping can be very tricky to undo (sometimes impossible) in the mastering process, but only takes a few minutes to check in the mix.

3) Check for quiet clicking noises or pops. There might be a few tiny clicks or noises coming from split audio regions or recorded sounds. These might seem barely hearable in the mix down. However, when your track is being compressed and limited in the mastering stage, all the quiet elements will be brought right up. So make sure you fix those small noises before sending off your mix.

We're always listening to your suggestions. The most common request throughout the year was feedback to improve your mixdown. Due to a limited time frame, we couldn't offer that in the past.