The Complete Guide to Mixing & Mastering Electronic Music

If you're new to any of this, start with what mastering actually is and how it's different from mixing. Then work out whether your own track is genuinely ready for it, or whether you should get some help choosing who does it.

Once you know what you're aiming for, most of the actual work is technical: getting the low end right, hitting the correct loudness for where the track is going, and understanding why it sounds different everywhere you play it.

The starting discipline is the same everywhere: kick first, build up from there. But how far you push each stage genuinely changes by genre. More genre-specific pieces are on the way; house is the deepest one on the site so far.

AI mastering tools exist and they're not going away, and they're genuinely fine for some things. Where they hold up, where they fall apart, and why, in full.

Stem or stereo, vinyl or streaming, what it actually costs and why, and the specific formats, Apple Digital Masters included, that come up once a release is close.