Whether you're fine-tuning your rough mix before passing it on for a professional mixdown or perfecting your final mix before sending it off to be mastered, these checklists will guide you through essential steps to ensure your tracks are ready-to-go. Download and run through each checklist before mixing and mastering to achieve the best possible sound for your music.
Some of the best music is a result of collaboration. The more skilled ears and hands that contribute to the final product, the better. This is why, in most cases, to get the best sound, you should work with experienced, genre-specific mixing and mastering engineers.
If you do plan on mixing and mastering your own music, you should follow the industry-standard production, mixing, and mastering process. Complete the entire music creation process—songwriting, composition, recording, production, and rough mixing—before you move on to the mixing stage. You don't want to have to go back and revise a part after your song has already been mixed. This applies to mastering, as well. Once you finish your final mix and move on to mastering, you shouldn't be going back and tweaking individual stems. Your mix should already be complete and, if done well, not require much processing during the mastering stage.
We created this checklist to help you get your song ready to be mixed. Whether it's a simple once-over or an entire focused listening session, it can never hurt to take some time to review this checklist before sending out your stems or getting started with the mix.
Note: When sending your stems to the mixing engineer, the best practice is to send the raw, unaffected stems, along with the edited stems and a rough bounce that represents your intended sound for the mix. This gives the engineer the option to use their own effects or tweak your effects if needed. This also helps in cases where the engineer has different plugin licenses from yours. Make sure to note any effects you want the engineer to include on any tracks or during any sections of your arrangement.
If you download the checklist and open the file with any PDF viewer, you will be able to go through and check off each of the boxes as you listen to your rough mix.
We created this checklist to help you get your song ready to be mastered. Whether you are mixing your song yourself or you simply want to review your mixing engineer's work, it can never hurt to take some time to listen and run through this checklist before sending your track to the mastering engineer.
If you download the checklist and open the file with any PDF viewer, you will be able to go through and check off each of the boxes as you listen to your final mix.
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