Mixing into a mastering chain

Working into master-bus processing plugins can help you achieve nextlevel cohesion, sheen and weight. Here’s one way to do it…

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We wouldn’t recommend this for beginners, but if you have a decent understanding of mixing, try working into a master processing chain from the start. First, we’ll load an SSL-style bus compressor on our DAW’s master output, in an empty project.

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To begin, we set up the compressor with a gentle 2:1 ratio, 10ms attack and .6s release – this will allow transients through, and gently ride sustain. We set the sidechain filter to 80Hz, to remove heavy sub bass from the compressor’s detection circuit.

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Now it’s time to begin our mix, so we load our individual tracks into our DAW. As we set up a basic level balance, we aim for about 2-3dB of gain reduction on the master-bus compressor. This master compressor is guiding our decision-making straight away – adjust compressor settings if needed.

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Our mix is sounding pretty good already – but if we deactivate the master compressor, everything falls apart, as it’s shaped our level-balancing. Moving on, we’d like a bit of analogue colour, so we apply very subtle master-bus tape saturation, pre-compression.

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To finish, we load a limiter plugin last in the chain. After applying as much gain reduction as possible before distortion or pumping, we then back this off a fraction to retain some dynamics. This master chain is definitely shaping the mix – the track sounds far less gelled and ‘pro’ when we bypass the master plugins.