Mastering prep: the checklist before you send your mix
Five minutes that set the ceiling on how good the master can be — whether it goes to an engineer or back to your own ears tomorrow.
Mastering works on the finished stereo sum. That single fact explains every item below: anything baked into the bounce — a limiter, a clipped peak, a cut-off tail — is permanent, and anything the master could reveal — noise, clicks, a hollow low end in mono — will be louder after it. Prep is cheap insurance against expensive surprises.
The technical handoff
- Peaks around −3 to −6 dB — dynamics intact, nothing slammed
- No limiter, clipper or "loudness" plugin on the master bus (bounce a separate loud reference with it if you want to communicate intent)
- Bounce at the session's native sample rate and 24-bit — no upsampling, no dither-to-16 yet
- Full length: nothing cut at the start, reverb/delay tails complete at the end, plus a beat of silence
- Bounce listened to start to finish — the render, not the session (renders miss automation, drop plugins, and glitch)
- File named like an adult: artist_title_mix_v3_24bit.wav — future-you is a client too
The quality gate — one last honest listen
- No clicks, pops, or bad fades anywhere in the bounce
- Low end checked in mono — if the bass hollows out, fix it in the mix now
- No element-level defect you can name: a buried vocal or boomy 100 Hz is a mix problem, and mastering will amplify it, not fix it
- Fresh ears: at least one night between final mix and this listen
If it goes to a mastering engineer
- Two or three reference tracks named, with one line on what you like about each
- Notes on intent: target platform(s), any known concerns ("the 3 kHz area worries me"), whether you want loud-competitive or dynamic
- All versions they'll need requested up front: main, instrumental, clean, acapella
If you master it yourself
- New session, not the mix session — the temptation to "fix the mix from the master bus" needs a wall, not willpower
- References loaded and loudness-matched before any processing
- Order of operations: corrective EQ → glue/dynamics → loudness last
- After loudness: the small-speaker test again; pumping and edge show up there first
- Exports per destination: 24-bit archive master + platform versions, tagged
The trap in self-mastering isn't technique — it's that mastering session quietly becoming mix revision number nine. If you hear a mix defect, name it, go back one stage, fix it, close the stage again. That's the discipline from when is a song finished, and it applies double here at the end.
The last stage, step by step, like the other three.
One active project free · $4.99 one-time unlocks full features · plans for 10+ projects. No card to start.
Open The Engineer's Workpad