Break it ‘til you make it

If you’re a producer looking to make your music as loud, clear and polished as it can be, a basic knowledge of the mastering process is vital. But even if you then hand over your premaster to a professional, you can still use this knowledge as a useful method for testing the quality and stability of your mixdown. How? Well, by running your entire track through a rudimentary mastering chain yourself, you can intentionally ‘break’ the mix, and use this to hear problems that can then be solved within the mix project itself.

Here’s a typical scenario when mixing electronic music. If you feel your mixdown is almost complete, load up a brickwall limiter plugin last on your master channel, and apply limiting (by either raising the limiter’s input gain or lowering its threshold, depending upon the plugin), to reduce overall peaks. At some point, you’ll reach an amount of gain reduction where audible distortion begins to occur. Using both your eyes (by watching the limiter’s GR meter) and ears, note which mix elements are tripping this distortion first. Common culprits are your kick drum’s transient colliding too much with your sub bass, or a vocal clashing with competing midrange sounds (ie guitars or synths). If one particular element is creating distortion, this could be a sign that it’s too loud in the mix, or too dynamic compared to the rest and needs compressing a bit more.

Similarly, you can use EQ on your master bus. Compare your track to a high-quality song in the same genre, then use master EQ boosts and cuts to quickly align your mix’s tonal balance with the reference’s. If you need to use heavy-handed EQ moves to do this, it’s a sign that some parts may need work.

Once you’ve used master processing this way, turn off those two-bus plugins and head back in to fix the problems you found. A few volume tweaks might be all it takes to lift your mixdown by a few percent.