Guide
Should you master your DJ mix?
Not the way you master a track. Every track in your mix was mastered already, compressed and limited until it sounded finished. What a recorded mix usually needs is level: the drops brought to one loudness, and a final peak low enough to stay clean after the upload. Two measurements tell you whether yours needs it. If yours does and you'd rather not do it by hand, KRATEO Setmaster does it in the browser (see the end of this guide).
Why a mix that sounded right comes out uneven
You set every level by ear, on the system in front of you. A club system with a heavy low end makes the bass-heavy tracks feel too big, so you pull them down, and in that room it is the right call. Headphones do the opposite to the same tracks. A trim set in a hurry and a channel fader left a little low add to that. The drops of a recording can end up several dB apart.
Do I need to master my DJ mix? Check two things
- The gap between your drops. Measure the loudness of each drop with a loudness meter (how), or simply play your quietest drop right after your loudest. If you reach for the volume, so will your listener.
- The true peak, the highest point of the waveform, in dBTP. If it reads above 0 dBTP, the recording is clipped in places already, and the lossy encode of a streaming service can push those peaks further over. Bringing the peak down to -1 dBTP leaves room for that encode.
Master the mix if the first check shows a gap between your drops, or the true peak reads above 0 dBTP. Master it as well if the true peak sits well below -1 dBTP because the recording level was low: a mix peaking at -5 dBTP comes up 4 dB before its peak reaches -1 dBTP, with nothing else changed. At the least, turn it up that far. Why is my DJ mix so quiet? has more on that.
Why mastering a mix like a track does damage
Mastering a track trades dynamic range for loudness, through compression and limiting. Your tracks went through that already. A second limiter across the finished mix turns the gain down at every peak it catches and lets it back up over its release time: pushed a few dB louder, that changes nearly every sample of the mix, not only the peaks.
Won't SoundCloud even out the level anyway?
No. SoundCloud plays your mix at the level you uploaded it. Where a platform does normalize, it turns the whole mix up or down by one amount and leaves the drops as far apart as they were.
Mastering a DJ mix with KRATEO Setmaster
KRATEO Setmaster is mastering for recorded DJ sets, built on this idea: every drop hits the same, and nothing compresses or limits your tracks. It finds the drops and proposes a gain for each, the quieter ones lifted toward your loudest. You keep the last word on every value and hear the result before the master is made. The first 60 minutes of a set are free, as MP3, without an account.
To do it by hand instead, follow How to master a recorded DJ mix.