Is Your Mix Ready for Mastering? 10 Checks Before You Pay
8 min read
You finished your mix. It sounds good on your monitors. Time to master, right?
Not so fast. Mastering can't fix a bad mix — it can only enhance a good one. If your mix has problems you can't hear on your speakers, mastering will amplify them, not hide them. And you'll pay $30-50 to find out.
Here are 10 checks to run before you send your mix to mastering. MixDiagnose runs all of these automatically — but understanding what they mean will make you a better producer.
No band should dominate. Sub bass (20-60Hz) should be controlled. Bass (60-250Hz) should be present but not muddy. Mids (500-2kHz) should be clear. Highs (6-20kHz) should be airy, not harsh.
How to check: MixDiagnose's 6-band spectral analysis shows relative levels. If any band is 6dB+ above the average, it's a problem.
Your mix should sit around -14 to -10 LUFS before mastering. If it's louder than -8 LUFS, you've already compressed too much — mastering has no headroom to work with.
Target: -14 LUFS for Spotify compliance, -16 for Apple Music.
If your true peak hits 0 dBFS or above, you're clipping. Mastering can't fix digital clipping — it's baked into the file. Aim for true peak at -1.0 dB or lower.
Too narrow = sounds flat and lifeless. Too wide = phase issues and mono incompatibility. A width of 0.6-0.9 is healthy for most genres.
Sum your mix to mono. If it sounds thin, phasey, or parts disappear, you have phase issues. This will cause problems on phone speakers and club systems.
How to check: Correlation meter should stay above 0 in mono. MixDiagnose measures this automatically.
If your dynamic range is under 6dB, you've over-compressed. Mastering needs dynamics to work with. A healthy DR is 8-14dB for most genres.
The 200-500Hz region is where mud lives. If your mix sounds muddy, boxy, or congested, this is usually why. Cut 2-4dB in this region on tracks that don't need low-mid presence.
Crest factor (peak to RMS ratio) tells you how punchy your mix is. 10-15dB is healthy. Below 8dB means you've squeezed the life out of it.
Listen on headphones at high volume for clicks, pops, or distortion. These are impossible to fix in mastering.
Test on: earbuds, car speakers, phone speaker, and a club system if possible. If it only sounds good on your monitors, it's not ready.
Run all 10 checks in 30 seconds
MixDiagnose runs all of these checks automatically when you upload a track. You get a severity-graded diagnosis — Critical, Moderate, Minor, or Ideal — for each issue, plus one-click fixes for the most common problems.
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