How to Prepare Your Mix for Mastering: A Practical Checklist
A little preparation before sending your mix can go a long way. None of this is a strict set of rules, think of it more as a checklist of things worth considering. In most cases it will make my job easier, and that usually means a better result for you. Here is what I tend to look for.
Remove any masterbus limiting
This is the most common issue. If you have a limiter or hard clipper on your masterbus for reference listening, remove or bypass it before exporting. Limiting baked into the file leaves me with little room to wiggle.
That said, not everything on the masterbus needs to go. Light compression, saturation, or a harmonic generator used for colour and character is perfectly fine to leave in place, as long as its purpose is shaping the sound, not making the track loud. The key question to ask yourself is: is this plugin here because it makes the mix sound better, or because it makes it sound louder? If the answer is louder, bypass it before you export. If it is adding warmth, glue, or harmonic content, it can stay.
Leave some headroom
Make sure your master bus is not going over 0 dBFS, that is full scale, the absolute ceiling of a digital system. The exact number below that does not matter. Whether your peaks are sitting at -6, -3, or -0.1 dBFS, it is all fine. What is not fine is clipping or peaking on the master fader. As long as nothing is hitting or exceeding 0 dBFS, you are good to go.
Export at the session sample rate and bit depth
Do not downsample before sending. If your session runs at 48kHz 32-bit float, export at 48kHz 32-bit float. Let us handle the conversion to the delivery format.
Check for clicks and pops
Play through the full export before sending. Clicks and pops at edit points or plugin transitions are easy to miss during mixing but become very obvious in a mastered file.
Include a reference
If you have a track that represents the sound or feel you are after, include it with your files. A good reference tells the mastering engineer more than a paragraph of notes.