From the pros: 5 essential mastering tips for 2025

Mastering can seem intimidating, but the truth is, it's more accessible than you might think. Like any creative skill, mastering is a craft honed through dedicated practice and experimentation.

However, that doesn't mean you have to figure it all out alone. To help you on your journey to a become a better mastering engineer, we've gathered insights from some of the industry's professionals. These nuggets of knowledge offer valuable perspectives on current trends, techniques, and approaches to mastering, empowering you to create your best-sounding music in 2025 and beyond. 
 

Tips for the road

Start mastering your music using iZotope Ozone, a powerful mastering suite that can help you get a release-ready sound. 

Demo Ozone free

Introducing the mastering engineers

Before we get started, let’s meet our engineers!

Elaine Rasnake is a Philadelphia-based mastering engineer who works from her studio, Daughterboard Audio, and has mastered projects for Gregory and the Hawk, Boyscott, Chase Petra, Sadurn, Shallow Alcove, and many others. She uses several iZotope products in her daily workflow including: Insight, Tonal Balance Control 2, RX, and Ozone.

Stephen Marsh is a first-call Mastering engineer for film television and game music, is well-known in audiophile circles as a go-to remastering facility and he has amassed an enviable discography of popular music albums including multiple Grammy nominees.  He has been mastering for 31 years and he currently operates Marsh Mastering and The Lathe Room in Los Angeles, California.

…And finally, me, the author! I’ll intersperse my comments in with everyone else’s.

Maggie Luthar is a GRAMMY-winning mastering engineer at Dark Sky Mastering, currently based in the Los Angeles area. She works with all genres of music, from indie rock to Americana to classical to hip-hop and beyond. Her workflow includes digital and analog equipment, and she has extensive experience in vinyl production.

Top mastering tips

1. Communication is key

Probably the most foundational aspect to any service-oriented career is communication. In the creative world, this communication is often more nuanced and complex than a simple “please and thank you!” Being able to read the room and figure out what an artist wants takes emotional intelligence as well as practice. At the end of the day, we are artists in service of artists. 

This is especially true in 2025, when we have all sorts of different mediums to communicate with. 

Stephen says, 

“From the artist's perspective, this is the last chance before the world hears it, this can lead to some unexpected requests from a mastering engineer.  My best advice when this happens is this: unless you're absolutely 100% convinced the artist is, without doubt, nuts – go with it and do what you can to see through the request. They're the artist, sometimes the job is to help them find the sound only they can hear, sometimes it's to let go if you cannot.”

Elaine says, 

“Communication with your client is key. Oftentimes when I am quality checking mixes for clicks and pops, I will come across various sounds that I am not certain whether or not they should stay in. This could be an inhale before the first strum of a guitar, laughter from a band member during a cymbal fadeout, etc. While this is all easy to remove using various RX modules, sometimes these sounds are kept in on purpose during the mix stage. 

These extra sounds can create a sonic sense of intimacy or rawness, as if the listener was sitting right there while the performance is being recorded. This is why it is always super important to check in with the artist and ask questions like, "I noticed this sound, was this intentional or just something that snuck by?"

Over time, you’ll start to notice and understand better the differences in how artists talk. For example, one thing I learned pretty early on in my career is the word “dynamic” means different things to people. I used to assume that anytime someone said “I want my record to be really dynamic!” it meant keeping a really fluid and wide dynamic range - I came to learn that didn’t always mean that. Sometimes it just means loud and more compressed. I always ask for clarification right away if something seems confusing to me, or a bit off. I’d rather get too much information than too little!”

2. Practice critical listening and use reference tracks

How we listen and feel music when we are mastering audio is different from casually listening. It’s important to be able to distance yourself from your own objective thoughts about a song and immerse yourself in what the client gave you and what their ultimate goal is - and what you can do (or not do!) to get it there. Sometimes it helps to ask for reference tracks if something is a bit unfamiliar or particular. 

And while modern technology can analyze audio and make suggestions, it can't truly understand music the way humans can. Mastering engineers need to critically listen to identify subtle nuances, emotional impact, and artistic intent that algorithms might miss. 

Elaine says,

“Don't be afraid to use reference tracks, especially if you are working in an unfamiliar genre. As a mastering engineer, it is important that we familiarize ourselves with all kinds of music and genres. But sometimes a project comes across our desk and it may be something that we don't listen to often or haven't listened to at all. There are thousands of genres out there, each with their own unique style and sound. Sometimes distortion is the whole point of the genre, sometimes a heavily rolled off high end is the essence of a genre's sound. That's why it's always a good idea to find and use reference tracks to learn about how a specific genre sounds. 

You can even put these tracks into your mastering session and use Tonal Balance Control and Insight to see what frequency areas are more prominent as well as what the general LUFS level may be on average. This information can be a great guideline to creating the best master for your mix.”

Stephen says, 

“Feel first, listen second: I've said before that listening to a piece of music is the last thing I do when I master it.  This is a comment I find garners confused looks more often than not, but the explanation is simple: music – as a medium for conveying emotions – requires you listen with your heart.  Your ears are only indirectly involved in how a song makes you feel and that is what I'm trying to achieve in mastering – to enhance the emotional connection and further cement that bond between audience and artist. 

Building a sonic bridge for emotions to pipeline from the heart and soul of maybe just a single human to many, many more requires more than evening out frequencies and making sure the vocal doesn't get lost, you can make those adjustments with your ears - the real magic is in adjusting how the song makes you feel, to bring out the goosebumps, those moves come from the heart. Once that part is done you check your work with your ears, that's the 'proof'.”

With regards to reference tracks, I’ve found them helpful with not just understanding genre standards, but feeling out what a client really wants. I’ve gotten jazz references for mastering from a rock band because they liked the way the bass sounded on a particular record - sometimes a reference is more for feeling than it is for genre specifics.

3. Trust your technical skills and instinct

When starting out as a mastering engineer, the learning curve will be steep. As you gain your technical footing and instinct, it’ll be easier to trust your creative ideas and how to achieve them to make the client happy. You’ll also learn when to NOT touch something. 

Sometimes a mix needs very little work, which is when it can be much harder to trust my instincts than when something needs a heavy lift. If I’m doing just a bit of EQ and a limiter and very little else it’s almost like…is that it? 

This goes for excellent mixes as well as ones where perhaps there’s just not much else you can do. In the former instance, you don’t want to ruin the balance that the mix engineer hit right on the money. In the latter…sometimes doing too much just makes things overprocessed and unnatural sounding.

Stephen says,

“When I started mastering records 30 years ago it was much less common to get creative in the mastering process. 'Do No Harm' was the approach and you learned fairly early on that keeping your creative opinion to yourself was paramount to keeping the gig.  

As mastering evolved, artists now quite often view mastering as a creative process and  'Do Your Thing' has replaced 'Do No Harm' to a large extent. 

One client went so far as to request I 'use the mastering room like another instrument in the orchestra', unheard of in a 90's mastering room. This is an important shift to note as it implies you not only have the technical skills to tweak and format audio for distribution, but also the ability to emotionally connect with the music, form an opinion about it and execute moves that you feel will enhance that connection all within the context of the artist's vision and to effectively communicate with the artist through the process; finding the balance between the two. 

I've come to understand my opinions – the way I emotionally respond to music –  isn't a liability to be shrouded, it is quite literally what my clients are paying me for in the first place. They are THE most important piece of gear I take to every session.”

Elaine says,

“Doing nothing is doing something. One of the hardest things to notice as a mastering engineer is when a mix needs nothing done to it. It's so easy to reach for an exciter plugin to give it an extra boost of energy or add an EQ boost here and there when in reality, it was perfect from the get-go. 

A good portion of our job is quality checking and sometimes that means finding nothing wrong, nothing that needs to be added or adjusted, and sending it back to the artist to congratulate them on a fantastic and beautiful mix that does not need to be messed with any more. It's ready for the world.”

4. When setting your rates, value you

Talking about engineering rates can sometimes feel awkward or messy. It’s important to be reasonable about what you are charging based on your experience and knowledge but at the same time, value yourself. 

Figure out what makes your brand worthwhile, figure out what people will pay for that brand, and go for it. Maybe you’ll lose a client or two, and need to adjust either way - but that’s all part of the learning process of owning a business, and providing a service.

It’s easy to get bogged down by imposter syndrome, particularly as you advance in your career, in my opinion. But be realistic, push through it, and keep learning. 

Stephen says,

“Rates for mastering can vary wildly in different markets and it may seem hard to know where to set yours. I can’t give you a magic number, I cannot stress enough that they are based first and foremost on what you as an individual bring to the proverbial table – your value...not your cost. 

Cost is gear you have, cost is the room you built, cost is the advertising dollars you spend to bring in new work....that's all relatively meaningless in setting the price for your VALUE. 

Sure gear has value, a good room has value, but it all pales in comparison to the value created by what YOU are doing with it all. 

The unique set of factors that have shaped your listening preferences, formed your concept of 'good' and 'bad' audio, your synthesis of those elements have the most value. Base your rate on the value you represent to the artist over and above what they could accomplish with someone else or by themselves.”

5. Tips for the road

Here are a couple last tips from all of us that will help you in your mastering journey. 

Elaine says,

“Volume automation is your friend. Sometimes we get a mix that just feels flat. Everything sounds great sonically, but when the chorus comes in, it just doesn't hit the way it should. We may want to reach for more compression or more saturation, but more often than not, we just need to remember that we can control and automate the volume level. 

One trick is to turn the mix down a little bit and automate the volume so that when the chorus hits, the volume is at its default 0 dB position. This way you aren't introducing any extra distortion or unnecessary color but you have this extra energy boost that makes the chorus feel more exciting. 

The same idea, but in reverse, can be applied if a section of a song is too loud compared to the rest of the song. Keep everything at the default 0 dB and then automate the volume down a tiny bit so that it flows with the surrounding sections.”

Stephen says,

“Label everything. I couldn't count the number of times clearly labeled files would have made the mastering process more cost and time efficient.”

Mastering is more than the just the gear

The tips we talked about today are so much more than just learning what EQ or compression does - while those things are important, being a great mastering engineer (or frankly, any kind of professional, in audio or otherwise) is more than the tools you use. Communication, nuance, and understanding will help you grow your client base and learn more about your craft. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and keep learning.

One last tip from Elaine, with a sentiment I often repeat in these articles that I write for the education blog, and one I’m sure Stephen would agree with:

“Music is art and (almost) everything is a guideline. While it is important to be knowledgeable about delivery formats and making sure your mastered files meet certain numeric criteria (ie. Apple Digital Masters must meet certain requirements to be accepted, some digital distribution platforms will only accept certain audio file specs., etc.) it is also vital that we do not get bogged down by the numbers side of things and remember that music is all about how it sounds.

Demo Ozone free