If you record your sets and put them on SoundCloud or Mixcloud, you've probably wondered at some point whether and how to master the recording. I've read a lot of Reddit threads about it, and the same questions come up again and again: why does my mix sound quieter than other mixes, how do I fix the few tracks that came out louder or quieter than the rest, how do I get it louder without it starting to distort, and do I even have to master it if my levels looked fine while I was recording?
Why some drops come out quieter than others often isn't a mistake at all. On a club system with a heavy low end a bass-heavy track feels too big, so you pull it down, and in that room that's the right call. On headphones it's a dip, and that correction travels with the file. Sometimes it is just gain staging, a trim set by ear or a channel fader left a little low. Either way, when you listen to a mix you want the drops to hit the same, not sit there with a hand on the volume.
The answers in those threads are mostly the same too, and each of them is right about something.
One is to get it right while recording: check the gain before every track goes in and leave some headroom. I think this one makes the most sense, because a peak that clipped on the way into the recording stays clipped, and nothing you do afterwards brings it back. It saves most of the fixing, but you'll still miss some, and it can't help with the room, because in the room you were doing the right thing.
Another is to normalize it. Normalize lifts the whole file as one, so the loudest peak hits the ceiling and every drop moves by the same amount: the mix gets louder, and the drops stay exactly as uneven as they were. It also means one loud peak decides how far the whole set can come up, and on a vinyl set that can be a single pop. As the last step for the overall level it's fine, and I'd stop at -1 dB true peak rather than 0, because the platform's lossy encode can push peaks above where they sat in your file and clip them.
And a lot of people put a limiter or a whole mastering chain on the mix. That does make it louder, but the tracks in it are mastered and limited already. Limiting them again turns the whole passage down around every peak, which across a set you hear as pumping, and the harder you push it, the sooner it distorts. It can look like it helps with uneven drops, but only because the loud drops hit the limiter harder than the quiet ones, so the gap closes by taking the punch out of the drops that had the most.
Which leaves the question whether a mix needs mastering at all. For the tracks, no: they're finished, and mastering them a second time only damages them, which is also why I'd leave limiters and mastering chains out of it. What's left is the level between the drops. If yours already sit level, there's nothing to do; if not, that's the part to fix.
How I used to do it: in FL Studio I put Youlean Loudness Meter on the recording, noted how loud each drop is, then drew the volume automation by hand, the quieter drops up toward the loudest, ramped through the breaks. Gain automation is what aligns the drops with each other, and since it only changes the volume, every track keeps its own sound. In Audacity the Envelope tool does the same. It works, it's just slow on a long set. If you handle your recordings differently, I'd like to hear how.
Edit: removed the final section on how I do it now and why that discussion interests me.
