Common Mastering Mistakes Producers Make

This is the number one problem. Producers slam a limiter on the stereo bus, push it until the meter says it's loud, and send it to me with 0.1dB of headroom. Now I'm trying to master a track that's already been mastered badly.

Take the limiter off. Or at minimum, pull it back significantly. I need dynamic range to work with. If your premaster is already brick-walled, there's nothing for me to do except try to undo the damage.

Related but different. Even without a limiter, some mixes peak at 0dBFS with everything pushed to the ceiling. The mix bus is clipping on the loudest hits. That clipping is baked into the file.

Your premaster should peak around -3 to -6dBFS. That gives me room to add what the track needs without starting from a squashed position. If I have to turn it down 10dB before I start, that's fine. I'd rather turn it up than try to rescue something that's already clipping.

Compression, EQ, saturation, stereo widening, all on the stereo bus. By the time the track gets to me, it's been processed twice: once by the producer and once by me. Those processes stack and compound. If you've already compressed the stereo bus by 6dB, my compressor is working on a fundamentally different signal than if you'd sent it clean.

There's nothing wrong with light bus processing during mixing. A bit of glue compression, some gentle EQ. But if you've got a chain of six plugins on the master bus, bypass them before you export. Or at least send me a version with and without, so I can choose.

If your track collapses when summed to mono, it's going to sound thin on club systems, phone speakers, and any mono playback environment. Wide stereo effects are great, but if they cancel each other out in mono, you've lost energy where it counts.

Check your mix in mono before you send it. If elements disappear or the low end drops away, fix it in the mix. I can address some of this at mastering, but I can't add back phase-cancelled audio that's not in the file.

Your room lies to you. An untreated bedroom with reflective walls and bass traps in the corners (the wrong corners) will make your mix sound different to what's actually in the file. You mix to compensate for what you hear, not what's there.

If you can't treat your room properly, use headphones as a secondary check. Use reference tracks. Check your mix in the car. Multiple listening environments help you triangulate the truth.

If you're mixing and mastering without ever comparing to a professional release in your genre, you're navigating without a map. Reference tracks tell you where professional loudness sits, what the tonal balance should feel like, and how much bass and brightness is appropriate.

Match your reference at the same perceived volume. Don't compare your quiet premaster to a mastered track at full volume. Level-match, then compare. The differences become much clearer.

It happens more than you'd think. MP3 is a lossy format. The encoding throws away frequency information permanently. If you send me an MP3, I'm mastering a degraded version of your track. I can't recover what the encoder removed.

Always export at 24-bit WAV or AIFF. Whatever sample rate your session is running at is fine. Never convert to MP3 before mastering. The MP3 comes after mastering, as a delivery format.