You have to let the music guide you in all cases. You absolutely don't want to make everything sound the same or be at the same level, and you absolutely do not want to follow streaming normalization levels as a rule book.

There are no presets to those adjustments, and there aren't really any general 'rules' except that you want to make it sound as good as it can. I'm convinced that Ozone is almost entirely responsible for making people think this kind of heavy-handed processing is a part of mastering. Same with heavy-handed exciters or drastic changes to imaging. Reverb is almost always a no-no in mastering. If you're ITB, certain plugins add it as a side-effect and others mostly just do saturation. If you're working with analog gear, you typically get it for 'free' because nothing analog is ever perfectly clean. Pretty much, this boils down to EQ, compression, and limiting. One big picture thing is the set of final 'how it sounds' adjustments. Mastering comes down to 2 big picture things, and there are 2 general approaches to one of them. Mastering engineer here.for my perspective. These days, a lot of the mixes that mastering engineers get from top-shelf mix engineers are so good that the mastering engineer has little to do but sign off on it. In short, mastering is about matching loudness between the tracks of an album (though this is less and less of a concern as music is released and consumed in 'singles' format and in the form of streaming playlists), targeting specific loudness and density for different formats (streaming, mp3, CD, vinyl, etc), maybe some gentle EQ (maybe in the form of dynamic EQ, to keep an annoying freq in check), M/S processing and more. There are pro-audio forums that have mastering sub-forums where you can communicate with top-shelf mastering engineers. There are lots of YouTube vids on mastering. Maybe start with wikipedia and following the links out to related topics. If I were you, I would research mastering. I don't think it'll be very productive for you to ask for a list of mastering 'dos & don'ts' on a forum like this. This subforum was always a huge help for me and I hope for the best now too please!!! Also, What plugins do you use? I have many but don't know what to do and how and in what degree. I know it's better to have my tracks mastered by someone else, but I want to know what to expect and what to ask and have some of mine done by me (or tracks of others done by me for fun). Give me a specific example or general advice of what you do and in what order and through that I'll find my way to this. For example if someone uses a drop of reverb and slight compression, or heavy compression or whatever. You would really help me a lot if you can give me a plan(let's say), basic stuff you do at mastering to start learning. So to make long story short, I have no idea what I'm really doing. Now I know what a HUGE different it makes and how everything can sound so much more tight together and magically better. Some days ago I took a mixed track of mine, exported it, took the wav track and listened to it at a new bus and started to fool around adding some compression, some limiter, some reverb and some saturation and just turning the effects on and off. Until some time ago I had no idea what mastering is and what's its purpose.

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