In the last 14 years of working in the audio industry and helping thousands of musicians and engineers create great music from their home studio, I've seen every mistake in the book, and here's one of the biggest.

Honestly, if you're NOT getting your mixes to sound as loud and competitive as your reference tracks and pro records you love, you're probably making this same mistake.

A few weeks ago I was actually looking through one of my OLD hard drives (it was so old it needed a power supply and had a firewire cable...🤦‍♂️), and I came across some of my old stuff.

I pulled up some of my old mixes and boy was I NOT impressed.

I mean, the mixes were fine. I had done so many FOH live sound mixes at that point that I knew how to balance the tracks together with EQ, compression, and effects.

But I could tell immediately what my biggest mistake was back then.

As I played the mixes I instinctively grabbed my interface to crank up the volume and that's when I realized...

I was almost maxing out the volume on my interface!

That meant my mix was almost 50% quieter than any of the records I played for fun.

Yikes...so if my mix had come on after a professional record, you could've hardly heard it!

So what was the difference there?

One word: Mastering.

My mix wasn't loud enough because it wasn't mastered up to professional standards.

So if you're not mastering your mixes, they won't feel professional enough next to pro records because they're not loud enough.

Your mixes probably sound decent enough already. I know from experience, both from working on mixes and helping students improve theirs, that there are a million different ways to mix a song.

But there's only one way to make them sound like a professional record, and if you don't know how to make your mix loud enough to compete, it doesn't matter if you actually mixed your song a million times.

It still won't be enough.

You'll still be missing the final ingredient: Mastering.

Sure, you can always send your mix off to a mastering engineer and they'll take care of that for you, but that's going to cost you quite a bit over time.

The average price for a mastering engineer on Soundbetter is $80/song.

Let's say you want to eventually release 10 songs to put into an album...?

That's $800.

So it'll get pricey before you know it.

Or you might tell me, "But Björgvin, I don't think I'm qualified to master. It seems so advanced..."

Honestly...it's really not. If anything, mastering is simpler than mixing.

Remember, I'm the guy who tells you to Mix With 5 Plug-ins right?

Well, what if I told you that you only need THREE plug-ins to master?

• Linear Phase EQ for balance across the frequency spectrum
• Multi-Band Compression for tightness, punch, and glue
• Limiting to make things loud and competitive

That's what most professional engineers use while they master, and there's no reason you shouldn't learn how to use those tools too.

You already know that mastering is the key to taking your mixes and making them into professional and punchy records.

But you may be asking yourself:

• "How do is use all these plug-ins to master my mixes?"
• "How do I make them loud enough so I can feel confident in releasing my songs?"
• "How do I make sure my clients don't think that my mixes are weak when I send them a test mix?"

That's what I'll be showing you tomorrow when I open up my brand-new course, Master Your Mixes.

It's designed to show you exactly how to take your mixes and transform them into mastered records that sound loud AND dynamic.

If that's something you're interested in knowing more about, keep an eye on your inbox for the announcement.

It'll only be open for a few days so make sure you join as soon as see my email.

See you tomorrow,

Björgvin