How to Master a Song (And When to Hand It to Someone Else)

You put your finished song in a playlist next to the bands you like, hit shuffle, and yours is the one that sounds small. Quieter. Duller. Like it's coming from another room. Nothing is technically wrong with it — the parts are there, the mix is balanced — but it doesn't sit with the others.

That gap is mastering. It's the least glamorous stage of making a record and the one most independent artists skip, rush, or replace with a loudness plugin on the master bus. Here's what it actually does, a working process for doing it yourself, and an honest read on when to stop and hire someone.

What Mastering Actually Does

Mastering is the last creative and technical pass on a finished stereo mix. It has four jobs, and none of them is "make it louder," even though loudness gets all the attention.

• Tonal balance. Broad, gentle shaping so the song isn't dull, harsh, boomy, or thin compared to what listeners hear around it. Moves here are fractions of a dB across wide bands, not surgery.
• Translation. Making the song hold up on laptop speakers, earbuds, a car, and a club system. A mix that only works on your headphones hasn't been mastered, it's been finished in one place.
• Loudness and dynamics. Getting the song competitive without flattening the life out of it, and controlling true peaks so streaming encoders don't distort it.
• Consistency and delivery. On an EP or album, making the songs feel like one record: matched levels, sensible gaps, correct fades, and files that meet each platform's spec with the metadata attached.

The thing worth internalizing: mastering makes a good mix better. It does not rescue a bad one. If the vocal is buried, the low end is muddy, or two instruments are fighting, that's a mix problem and it will still be there after mastering, just louder. Fixing it upstream is faster and sounds better — our guide to mixing a song in a working order covers what to sort out before you get here.

Before You Start: The Handoff

Whether you're mastering your own song or sending it out, the file you start from decides the ceiling.

• Export at the session's sample rate, 24-bit minimum. Never master from an MP3 or from a file that's been bounced, re-imported, and bounced again. Every lossy round-trip costs you something you can't get back.
• Leave headroom. A mix peaking around -6 dBFS with no limiter on the master bus is the standard handoff, and it's what most mastering engineers ask for. Headroom isn't wasted volume — it's the room the mastering stage works in.
• Take the master-bus limiter off. If you mixed into one to hear how loud it might get, pull it before you export. Mastering a pre-crushed file means undoing damage instead of making decisions.
• Keep an alternate or two. An instrumental, a vocal-up version, and a clean edit cost you nothing to bounce now and are annoying to produce six months later when a sync opportunity or a radio submission asks for them.
• Name the file properly. ArtistName_SongTitle_Mix_v3_24bit48k.wav beats final_FINAL_2.wav every time, and it matters more once there are eight songs and three revisions each.

A Working Mastering Chain

There is no universal chain, but there's a reliable order, and it goes corrective first, then tonal, then dynamic, then loudness. Every stage is optional. Most songs need three of them, and the moves are small enough that you should be checking whether each one is doing anything at all.

• 1. Corrective EQ. High-pass any subsonic rumble below roughly 20–30 Hz, and cut anything that's obviously a problem. Narrow cuts only. If you find yourself doing surgery here, go back to the mix.
• 2. Compression for glue. A single compressor doing 1 to 2 dB of gain reduction at a slow attack and a release timed to the track. You're gently tightening the whole, not controlling anything specific. If you can clearly hear it working, it's too much.
• 3. Tonal EQ. Broad shelves and wide bells, half a dB to two dB. A touch of air above 10 kHz, a small tilt to warm or brighten. This is where the song stops sounding like a mix and starts sounding like a record.
• 4. Optional saturation. A small amount of harmonic distortion adds perceived loudness and density without the limiter doing the work. It also survives streaming encoding better than raw level does.
• 5. Optional multiband or dynamic EQ. Only for a specific problem — a bass that swells on two notes, a vocal sibilance that spikes. Reach for this fourth, not first.
• 6. Stereo adjustment. Slight widening above the low mids if the mix needs it; keep the low end mono or close to it. Then check in mono and confirm nothing collapsed.
• 7. Limiter, last. One limiter, set the ceiling to -1 dBTP, and bring the input up until you hit your target loudness. Watch the gain reduction meter: consistent 2–4 dB is normal, and sustained 8 dB or more means you're trading away the song's dynamics.

Use gain matching at every stage. Turn the processed version down until it's exactly as loud as the bypassed one, then A/B. Louder always sounds better, which is why an unmatched comparison will convince you that every plugin is an improvement.

Loudness: Aim for the Target, Not the Ceiling

The loudness war is genuinely over for streaming, and a lot of advice online hasn't caught up. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Tidal all normalize playback loudness: they turn loud masters down to hit their own published target. Spotify normalizes toward roughly -14 LUFS integrated, and Apple Music's Sound Check lands near -16 LUFS.

That means a master crushed to -6 LUFS doesn't play louder than a master at -12 LUFS. It plays at the same level, with less dynamic range, less transient punch, and more distortion. You gave up the things people can hear in exchange for a number nobody sees.

Practical targets: a true peak ceiling of -1 dBTP, integrated loudness somewhere between -14 and -9 LUFS depending on genre — quieter for folk, jazz, and singer-songwriter material, louder for dense electronic, metal, and hip-hop. But treat those as guardrails, not goals. Master until the song feels right, then check the meter to make sure you haven't gone somewhere silly. If your song hits -11 LUFS and still breathes, that's a good master.

One exception worth knowing: if you're pressing physical media, the rules change. A CD master and a vinyl master are different files with different requirements, and a vinyl cut in particular can't handle heavy out-of-phase bass or aggressive top end. If a record is in your plans, our guide to pressing vinyl for your band covers what the plant needs.

Referencing and the Checks That Catch Mistakes

Mastering is more listening than processing. The single biggest difference between an amateur master and a professional one isn't plugins — it's the discipline of comparison.

• Reference at matched loudness, always. Pull two or three commercial tracks in your genre into the session, level them to your master, and switch between them constantly. Listen for balance and weight, not detail.
• Listen quiet. Turn it down until it's barely there. Balance problems that hide at volume are obvious at a whisper.
• Check mono. Anything that disappears has phase issues, and mono is still how your song plays on a phone speaker and through most PA systems.
• Three systems minimum. Headphones, phone or laptop speaker, car. Note the problems on each, then fix them in one pass instead of chasing each system in turn.
• Sleep on it. Approve nothing the same day. The master that sounded huge at midnight often sounds harsh at nine in the morning, and that's the version that's telling the truth.
• Get ears that aren't yours. You've heard this song too many times to hear it. On Bandry, Showcase is built for that: you post a track and get private, anonymous feedback from other musicians, and you give feedback to get it. Anonymous is the point — people say the useful thing when their name isn't on it.

Delivering the Files

Distributors and platforms want the highest-quality file you have — upload the WAV, not an MP3, and let each service do its own encoding. Deliver at the session's native sample rate and 24-bit where the distributor accepts it, and keep a 16-bit/44.1 kHz dithered version on hand for anything that requires it.

Keep more than the final file. Archive the mix you mastered from, the master session or chain settings, and your alternates. Re-mastering for a vinyl cut, a sync brief, or a re-release is a twenty-minute job if you kept everything and a rebuild-from-scratch job if you didn't. When it's ready to go out, our guide to distributing your music covers getting it onto streaming.

When to Hand It Off

Mastering your own work is a real skill and worth building. It's also the stage where the returns on hiring out are highest, because a mastering engineer brings three things you can't buy with plugins: a treated room they've spent years learning, hundreds of records' worth of reference for what your genre should feel like, and ears that haven't heard your song before.

Hand it off when the release matters — a single you're pushing to playlists, an EP you're pitching to press, anything going to vinyl or to sync. Hand it off when you've done three passes and the same complaint keeps coming back. And hand it off for a full record, where consistency across songs is a job in itself.

Mastering is also almost entirely remote work, which is why it's one of the easier things to hire well. On Bandry, mastering engineers, mixing engineers, and producers post their own listings with links straight to their work, and because those services aren't location-dependent, remote posts are visible everywhere rather than only in your city. When one fits, you tap 🔗 and your contact details go to them directly — no booking middleman taking a cut, and no messaging layer for the conversation to die in. If you'd rather post the need, a "seeking" post naming your genre, the number of songs, and your deadline puts it in front of the engineers who want that work. Our guide to finding a mastering engineer covers rates, what to send, and how to vet one before you commit.