A Mastering Starter Chain

Mastering's job is to take a great mix and make it competitive on streaming, club systems and car speakers — without undoing the decisions you made in the mix. A safe starter chain looks like this. Work in 1 dB increments and trust your reference tracks more than your meters.

1. Set up references. Load two or three commercial tracks in the same style and gain-match them to your master so loudness isn't fooling you.
2. Corrective EQ. Narrow, surgical cuts only — clean up any resonances that survived the mix.
3. Bus compression. A 2:1 ratio pulling down 1–2 dB on the loudest sections. Slow attack so transients survive; medium release so the meter recovers between phrases.
4. Tonal EQ. Gentle ±1–2 dB shelves or wide bells to shape the overall tone. A small high-shelf around 12 kHz is the classic "open it up" move.
5. Saturation or clipping. Half a dB to one dB of soft clipping or tape saturation reins in transients so the limiter has less work to do.
6. Stereo width (optional). Use M/S EQ to lift the sides above ~200 Hz a touch; keep everything below mono.
7. Limiter. Ceiling at -1.0 dB true-peak. Bring the threshold down until you're seeing 2–4 dB of gain reduction on the loudest peaks — any more and you'll start hearing the limiter, not the music.
8. Loudness check. Aim for -8 to -10 LUFS integrated for streaming. Anything louder gets normalised back down and just sounds smaller.