Mastering at home: the basics, step by step

Mastering is the last creative step before release: you take a finished stereo mix and make it translate, so it sounds balanced on earbuds, a car and a club system, sits sensibly next to other records and is exported in a form distributors accept. In a professional room an engineer brings trained ears and accurate monitoring. At home you bring neither in full, so the job is to keep the process simple, careful and checkable.

This guide is for producers who have finished a mix and want to master it themselves, at least for demos, singles and EPs. It assumes a DAW with stock plugins and a loudness meter. Nothing here needs paid software.

First, decide whether the mix is ready

Most home mastering problems are mix problems. If the vocal is buried, the kick and bass fight, or the hi-hats are harsh, a mastering chain will not fix it; it will only make it louder. Go back to the mix. Our guides to low end and bass mixing and common bedroom mix mistakes cover the usual suspects.

A mix is ready to master when:

• You stop wanting to change balances when you listen on a second system.
• Nothing on the mix bus is pinning the meters. Leave a few dB of headroom, with peaks well under 0 dBFS.
• Any bus compression or limiting you used as part of the sound is printed in, and any "loudness" limiter you added just to impress yourself is removed.

Export the mix as a stereo file at the session's sample rate, in 24-bit or 32-bit float.

Set up a separate mastering session

Open a new, empty project and import the mix file. Working on a bounced file instead of on the mix bus does two things: it stops you sneaking back into the mix, and it makes every change obvious, because the only things that can change are the ones in front of you.

Import two or three reference tracks in the same genre too, and turn them down so they play at roughly the loudness of your track. A loud reference always sounds better, and a fair comparison is the whole point. Our guide to reference tracks explains how to pick them.

The four moves most masters need

A home master rarely needs more than four processors. Add them in this order and bypass each one regularly to check it is helping.

1. Corrective EQ

Listen against your references for broad tonal differences: too much low-mid mud around 200 to 400 Hz, not enough air on top, a boomy low end. Make small, wide moves, usually under 2 dB. If you want to cut or boost more than that, the problem is probably in the mix. A high-pass filter far below the kick, around 20 to 30 Hz, can remove rumble you cannot hear but your limiter will react to.

2. Gentle glue compression

A slow-attack, low-ratio compressor (around 1.5:1 to 2:1) catching only 1 to 2 dB of gain reduction can make a mix feel more of a piece. If you cannot hear a difference when you bypass it at matched level, take it out.

3. Optional colour

Light saturation or tape emulation can add density and help small speakers hear the bass. Use it sparingly, or skip it. This is the step most likely to be done for its own sake.

4. The limiter

The limiter sets final loudness and catches peaks. Set its ceiling first (see below), then raise the input gain until the track sits near your references. Listen for the moment transients lose their snap, the kick flattens or the mix starts pumping, and back off from there. The limiter is where most home masters go wrong, almost always by doing too much.

Loudness and true peak: the numbers that matter

Loudness is measured in LUFS, using the method in the ITU's BS.1770 standard, which also defines how true peak (the level between samples, after conversion) is measured. Put a loudness meter on the master output and play the whole track to read its integrated loudness.

Streaming services turn loud tracks down. Spotify says it adjusts playback to -14 LUFS by default, using the BS.1770 measure, and recommends keeping true peak below -1 dB, or below -2 dB for masters louder than -14 LUFS, so encoding does not add distortion. Set your limiter's ceiling to -1 dBTP as a safe default.

What that means in practice: a master crushed to be as loud as possible will simply be turned down on playback, and it will have lost its dynamics for nothing. You do not have to master to exactly -14 LUFS, and plenty of genres sit louder, but there is no prize for winning a loudness contest the platform cancels. Our guide to streaming loudness targets compares the platforms in detail.

Check it like a listener

Before you export, test the master the way people will hear it:

1. Level-matched A/B. Compare the master with the original mix at the same perceived loudness. If the master is not better when it is not louder, undo something.
2. Several systems. Earbuds, a phone speaker, a car, and a pair of headphones. Note problems; do not fix them on the spot.
3. Mono. Sum to mono briefly. If the bass or vocal drops away, revisit stereo widening, either in the mix or in the master.
4. The start and end. Check fade-ins, fade-outs and that nothing is clipped off the first transient.
5. A break. Come back the next day. Fatigued ears always want more top end and more level.

Export settings

Export a WAV at the session sample rate, 24-bit, with the limiter's ceiling still in place. Most distributors accept 16-bit/44.1 kHz and many accept higher resolution; check yours before you upload. If you reduce bit depth to 16-bit, apply dither on that final export only, because dither masks the small errors that truncation adds. Keep the unmastered mix, the master and the mastering session together, with notes on the chain, so you can revisit it later.

If you are mastering an EP or album, do one more pass with all the masters in a row: match perceived loudness and tone between tracks so nothing jumps out, and set the gaps.

A quick checklist

1. Fix mix problems in the mix, then bounce with headroom.
2. Master in a separate session against level-matched references.
3. EQ, gentle compression, optional colour, limiter. Small moves.
4. Ceiling at -1 dBTP; read integrated LUFS over the whole track.
5. Level-matched A/B, several systems, mono, a night's sleep.
6. Export 24-bit WAV; dither only when reducing bit depth.

What we think

The most useful mastering skill at home is not EQ or limiting. It is level matching. Almost every bad decision in a home master, from the over-bright top end to the flattened kick, comes from the fact that louder sounds better for a few seconds. Turn the comparison fair and most of those decisions make themselves.

We would also go further than the usual "master to the platform target" advice. With normalisation on by default at the biggest service, loudness has stopped being a competitive advantage and become a cost. The artists who will sound best on playlists are the ones whose masters keep their transients, because when every track is played back at similar loudness, punch and space are what is left to tell them apart. Master for the listener who never touches the volume knob, and accept that "quieter than the last record you bought" is fine.