This month’s video tackles a topic we’ve wanted to cover for over a year—home mastering and the hidden dangers of mixing into “smart” limiters like FabFilter Pro-L, Ozone, or even Ableton’s stock limiter. While these tools can make your track sound exciting, they often mask mix issues by applying complex processing or AI-driven algorithms. The problem? When you send the track to a mastering engineer, it can come back sounding worse—not because of the engineer, but because you’ve been mixing into a bandaid.

We share our updated mastering workflow, using a simple crusty limiter + clipper combo to encourage better mix decisions, and reveal how this approach leads to faster, louder, and more transparent results. You’ll learn:

• Why most limiter-based home masters cause more harm than good

• Our complete limiter + clipper method

• Loudness targets to aim for, tailored to your subgenre and bass profile, using LUFS

• How to stress test your mix for airtight translation before mastering

• Lessons from working closely with mastering engineer Bob Macc (Subvert Central)

If you’ve ever been disappointed by your final master or struggled with consistent playback across systems, this deep-dive will change how you approach your mixdown and pre-master process.

The Samples included in this product are 24bit 44.1kHz WAV Files. These exclusive samples were originally part of our Patreon Pack, which can be found via our Patreon page.

WAV Files are a very high quality, lossless audio file format and they are compatible with all DAWs, including: Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton, Fruity Loops, Cubase, Reason, Studio One, GarageBand, Sonar and many others.

Serum Presets may require the latest version of Serum, available from the Xfer Records website

Check out our blog for more hints and tips for your productions.