This is where your track’s headroom should lie around. Also, you need to make sure that the headroom of your mixdown/mixed track is around -6db to -8db. How we can make a track louder is what we are going to talk about when we’ll be discussing the plugins. Well, making your track louder is an important part of the mastering process but it is not the only reason. Whenever I ask this question, a lot of our students first talk about this, “Loudness”. If you can’t think of a reference which is completely identical to your track, you can also find a track which fits in the same genre of your current track, like I said, you don’t want to wander off in a random jungle, not knowing your final destination. Without a reference and ear training, you’re just wandering in a tropical jungle and none of the ways are going to lead you to your destination no matter how hard you try. So you don’t follow a random road, and you have a path to walk on. Now this is going to be your reference track, whatever processing that you’re going to do on your current track, you have the reference to refer back to. Once you have a professionally mixed/mastered track downloaded, you can import it into your mastering session and add it to an empty track next to your current track.
You can get a permanent download from sites like Beatport since, rest of the streaming platforms only offer tethered download. The very first thing that we need to look at when we are mastering or even mixing a track is the resemblance to any professionally mixed/mastered track which is already out there. But that being said, it is not that only a few can master a track, there are certain hacks which we are going to discuss today, which will enable you to master your tracks without spending a penny. It is said, that a mixing engineer is capable of offering mastering services only after gaining an experience of 6-8 years. A lot of mixing engineers find it troublesome to master tracks that they have mixed.
Mastering is a tricky and complicated task and it also requires a lot of ear training.
Today we are going to talk about the top 9 free mastering plugins, that you’ll need to master your tracks.