Mastering vs Mixing: Understanding the Key Differences
As a musician working today, you’ve obviously encountered the terms mixing and mastering. Sometimes the two can be easily confused with one another and I’ve seen way too much misinformation out there. While both are essential steps in the production process, they serve distinct purposes and require different mindsets, tools, and techniques. Understanding these differences is crucial to transitioning smoothly between the two stages and ensuring your music reaches its fullest potential. I’ll break down the differences below.
What Is Mixing?
Mixing is where your song really starts to take shape as a cohesive piece of art with all the flourishes and sonic touches you add. It’s the process of balancing individual tracks—vocals, drums, bass, guitars, synths, and more—into a unified whole while adding effects and various sound shaping tools to each instrument. You can think of mixing like assembling a puzzle: each piece (track) needs to fit perfectly into the bigger picture (the mix).
Key Goals of Mixing:
1. Balance: Ensuring no single element overpowers the others while maintaining clarity and focus. This is bread and butter and great mixers can usually create a shockingly good rough mix by the time a song has even finished recording.
2. Depth and Space: Using panning, reverb, and delay to create a sense of width and dimension. One of the more creative and fun aspects of mixing.
3. Tonal Shaping: Applying (largely subtractive) EQ to carve out space for each instrument in the frequency spectrum. The best mix engineers are masters at this.
4. Dynamics Control: Using compression to tame peaks and glue elements together. Think of the way the guitar, bass, and drums in Tame Impala’s rhythm section lock in and groove together.
Mixing is highly creative—it’s where you make artistic decisions about how your song feels emotionally and define your track’s identity.
Practical Advice for Producers:
• Don’t rush through mixing. Take breaks to avoid “mix fatigue,” where your ears lose objectivity after hours of listening.
• Use reference tracks to compare your mix against professionally mixed songs in a similar genre.
• Focus on getting your mix as polished as possible before moving on to mastering—it’s not about perfection but rather giving mastering engineers a solid foundation to work with.
What Is Mastering?
Mastering is the final step in music production. It’s less about creativity and more about refinement—assessing and polishing your mix so it translates well across all playback systems (from car speakers to high-end headphones) while meeting technical standards for distribution. I wrote a detailed history of mastering over the decades in this post.
Key Goals of Mastering:
1. Consistency: Ensuring your tracks sound balanced and cohesive from start to finish. A sense of continuity in tone and vibe can vastly improve an album.
2. Translation: Making sure your song sounds great on any playback system or streaming platform. Music is played all over the world in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of listening environments; your song has to sound great in all of them.
3. Loudness Optimization: Adjusting levels to compete with other tracks without sacrificing dynamics or clarity. Nobody wants to sound dull and lifeless next to another artist on a playlist, and there is scientific merit to the “louder sounds better” argument.
4. Final Touches: Applying subtle EQ, compression, limiting, and sometimes stereo enhancement to elevate the mix. Great mastering engineers tend to have a natural touch for guiding a song in the direction in which it needs to go.
Mastering is also where technical details like file format (WAV, MP3), sample rate, bit depth, and loudness normalization for streaming platforms come into play. Unlike mixing, which focuses on multiple individual tracks, mastering engineers work with a single stereo file (or stems in rare cases) to enhance the overall sound.
Practical Advice for Producers:
• Avoid over-processing during mastering—less is often more at this stage.
• Leave enough headroom in your final mix (typically -6 dBFS) before sending it off for mastering. This gives the mastering engineer room to work without distortion or clipping.
• If you’re mastering yourself (although I do recommend reaching out to your friendly Australian-American neighborhood mastering engineer), use high-quality plugins and monitor in a neutral listening environment. Check out my post Tips For DIY Mastering here.
Transitioning Between Mixing and Mastering
The handoff between mixing and mastering is critical—and it’s where many producers and mixers stumble. Here are some tips to ensure a smooth transition:
1. Don’t “Master” While Mixing: It’s tempting to slap a limiter and plenty of presets on your master bus during mixing to make everything louder, but this can lead to poor decisions down the line. Keep your master bus clean or use simple, light processing.
2. Focus on Headroom: Leave enough space in your mix for mastering adjustments—this means avoiding clipping and keeping peaks below -0 dBFS.
3. Export High-Quality Mixes: Always export mixes as high-resolution lossless WAV files (24-bit or 32-bit float) at the same sample rate as your recorded session.
4. Trust Fresh Ears: If you’re self-mastering, take a break after finishing your mix so you can approach it with fresh ears during mastering. Ask friends for their constructive feedback.
Why Both Stages Matter
Mixing and mastering are like two sides of the same coin—they work together to bring out the best in your music. A great mix sets the stage for an exceptional master, while thoughtful mastering ensures that the hard work put into mixing shines through on every platform.
If you’ve spent countless hours sweating over your song during mixing, don’t underestimate the value of professional mastering. It’s not just about loudness; it’s about making sure your music sounds as good as possible and is resonating with listeners exactly as you intended—whether they’re streaming it to earbuds or blasting it through their car speakers at full volume.
I really believe that dedicating yourself solely to mastering a craft (no pun intended) has value and that a team of specialists is better than a one man army. I encourage you not to buy into the rhetoric of certain high-profile engineers who sell plugins and would have you believe mixing and mastering are essentially the same thing and can be done simultaneously.
By understanding the real key differences between both of these sonic arts—and respecting each practice for what it brings—you’ll be better equipped to navigate the creative journey from voice note to finished masterpiece.