Is Your Mix Ready for Mastering?

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Preparing a mix for mastering can be a very nerve wracking thing. This video should hopefully serve as a little checklist for you to be able to make the objective judgement as to whether or not your mix is ready to send off to a mastering engineer. There is a lot of nonsense floating around about the role of mastering and why its so important to get a lot of things right prior to sending the mix off.

00:00 - Intro
0:29 - What Is Mastering?
1:34 - Is The Mix is What Youre Going For?
2:12 - Are The Creative Decisions Already Made?
3:28 - Does Your Mix Translate?
4:13 - Did You Get Feedback?
5:55 - Can You Listen all the Way Through?
6:30 - Mastering Prep Tips

[SeedtoStage]

Here is the Checklist:
1. Does the Mix already sound like what you're going for?
2. Have the creative decisions already been made?
3. Does the mix translate to the best of your ability?
4. Did you get feedback from others you trust?
5. Can you listen all the way through without wanting to fix things?

[taylorpilewski]

The meme at 0:32 🤣

Another great video Anthony. You are regularly referrenced in conversations across music forums, Reddit and the like, as a go-to content creator on the topic of electronic music production.

Great production values in your videos, valuable advice and guidance backed by practical yet deep knowledge of the fundamentals. You are a master at communicating and taking technical concepts, distilling them down into digestible and understandable bits and making it fun to learn. Keep up the great work. So many of us appreciate your efforts!

👊

[dustinkirk]

You've been probably the biggest help in my Youtube journey as a passionate amateur DJ & producer - Have been DJing vinyl for years but naturally gravitated towards music production as I get older. Having no formal training or knowledge and being totally self-taught in all aspects of my musical journey over time, the hardest thing for me was asking questions and trying to understand where mixing a track finishes and mastering begins. And I feel like a big part of electronic music these days is mixing while you're creating. Thanks for the video, this one helped a lot!

[spooqs]

Talking about these things with you and everybody else on the Seed to Stage discord has given me SO MUCH perspective on this aspect of music making. There is so much misconception and misinformation out there about what engineers are supposed to be doing. Asking your engineer to 'fix' something or work out some issue in sound design is definitely something to avoid - but my engineer tells me that this happens fairly often - even from experienced musicians.

The advice of asking yourself 'is this the best that I can make this sound at my current skill level?' is simple, effective and ensures that your engineer is getting the best starting point.

One thing I'd say is that developing a relationship and rapport with someone who either loves this part of the music making process or can be your 'master swap buddy' and finish each other tracks together can give you incredible insight into mixing your own tunes much better.

[Ipumadrill]

Dude your new haircut looks great! Thanks for great content as always.

[Josh]

great video man, btw and i mean this as a total compliment, you look like a young version of Serious Black from harry potter:)

[thesageofvisonaryroots]

The chapter on 'Does Your Mix Translate' is great. This video as a whole is valuable information. Thanks, Tony!

[tyeblee]

This is such valuable information for me right now 🙏

[Legonatic]

Realizing I might know more about mixing and mastering my own tracks after watching this 🤔

[jaime]

If I have a group of tracks that all have their own individual limiters, such as a track In for the drums with a transparent limiter, a track In for the bass with a heavier limiter, a track In for my synths, etc. and these track In's are then sent to a Pre-Master, when it comes time to export stems for my mastering engineer, should I turn OFF all of the limiters? The track Ins that have limiters are just apart of my mixing process.

[riverkelly]

Hey man would you happen to offer 1 on 1 sessions I’m just looking to tackle a few questions and I really like your teaching style, cheers !

[wizzy]

Could you explain this -14 LUFS for streaming platforms? I recorded some WAVS from spotify (without normalization, highest possible quality) and my every reference track (Boris Brejcha) has around -8 to -9 LUFS. Why everybody is talking about -14?

[riverkelly]

And if so, how much would they be. Maybe I can get your email or something