Mixing & Mastering Electronic Music in 2026

Why is mixing and mastering electronic music so damn hard?

As someone who has spent over a decade honing and perfecting mixing and mastering electronic music, I’ve come to a slightly radical conclusion.

There are really only two approaches to creating great mixes and masters (without investing in education):

Related tool: Mix Master Flow: three producers, 145M+ combined streams, 9 full tracks mixed and mastered in real time. Then finish yours.

Approach A: Teach Yourself, Watch Tutorials, Collaborate, and Do as Much Work as Possible

This is how most producers do it. And I’ll be the first to say there is nothing wrong with this approach. In fact, this is exactly how I got started.

The upside: You’re accountable for yourself. The more work you put in, the more you’ll get out. It’s also very cost effective. With all the free content out there, you could theoretically learn how to make fantastic sounding music without ever spending a dime on education.

The downside: This approach takes a long time. We’re talking years. You’ll also run into tons of conflicting advice. It’ll be hard to sort through and even harder to know what actually works.

The downright ugly? Most producers who chose this route eventually quit. There are exceptions, but most never get deep enough into the art of music production to experience any true success.

Approach B: Hire a Mixing or Mastering Engineer and Focus on Being Creative

The upside: Less time intensive. This will free you up to focus on what you love most: making music. With someone else handling the technicalities, you can get back to having fun with sound design, layering, and composition.

The downside: It’s expensive. And the reality is you’ll still be involved in the mixing and mastering process. You’ll go back and forth with edits, or even attend mixing sessions. Otherwise you run the risk that the engineer might never fully realize your artistic vision.

The downright ugly: A lot of engineers simply don’t care about your art. They’ll do enough to make your music sound half-decent, but no more than that. It becomes a day job, and like any day job, it leaves them jaded and bored. Your music gets robbed of the attention necessary to make it sound truly fantastic.

Add this all up, and in an ideal world you’d still want to:

• Learn how to actually mix and master yourself
• Focus on the techniques and strategies you actually need to know
• Save time so you can focus on writing and composition
• Not spend too much of your hard-earned money on engineering

That’s a laundry list of asks, and none of them are small. This is why mixing electronic music is so damn hard.

The 8 Most Common Mixing & Mastering Mistakes

When it comes to mixing electronic music, we’ve talked about two wildly different approaches to the uphill battle of mixing and mastering. Whatever path you choose, here are 8 mixing and mastering mistakes you cannot afford to make:

1. You Think Your Mix Is Just Missing That One Little Thing

At one point or another, every producer is guilty of this. You’ve spent a lot of time on your craft, made some decent music. But when you compare it to the producers you look up to, it falls short. You start thinking “if my mix just had that one thing, it would sound great.”

The truth is, your mix isn’t missing one thing. It’s missing a lot of things. This is your brain trying to solve a very complex problem that involves a lot of moving parts (EQ, saturation, compression, sidechain, reverb, gain staging, automation, sound design, layering) and can’t be solved by any one tip or technique.

2. You Don’t Need Third-Party Plugins

I get it. Your DAW’s plugins are super powerful. And yes, you can get 70-80% of the way there using only your DAW’s plugins. But this notion that you don’t need to invest in third-party plugins is like a painter who won’t invest in high-quality paints, brushes. And canvas.

Eventually, if you want to compete with the best in the world, you’ll want to be using at least some of the same tools. You don’t need all of them. All you need is a select group of plugin bundles that will drastically improve your mixes and masters (assuming you actually know how to use them).

3. You Only Check Your Mix on Your Monitors

If all goes according to plan, the music you make will be heard on every system imaginable: laptop speakers, car stereos, festival systems, club speakers, iPhones. And even some random gaming speakers that have somehow survived since the early 90s.

How can you possibly make sure that your music sounds great on all of these different systems? There is actually a correct answer to this.

4. You Fully Outsource Your Mastering

The problem with entirely outsourcing your mastering isn’t the cost. It’s the fact that by avoiding mastering, you’ll never know how your music sounds as a finished product until you get it back from the engineer.

This means every time you have edits, you’re theoretically mixing blind (because you don’t know how your track will sound once it hits your engineer’s mastering chain). Trust me, there is a MUCH better way to solve for this.

5. You Spend a Lot of Time Mixing in Mono

Somewhere, somehow, someone spread the myth that all clubs are in mono. Maybe this was true in the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s, but not anymore. Club systems are in stereo.

I’ve played hundreds of them. I know several artists who’ve played thousands of them. I (and they) can confirm: clubs are not in mono.

The reality is, 99% of your music will be heard on stereo systems, on headphones, in car stereos, on laptop and iMac speakers.

If you don’t believe me, check out this hilarious response from Mario (formerly of Myon & Shane 54). It gets better every time I read it.

Positioning your mix to sound beautiful in stereo should be the absolute focus. Mono should be the afterthought. How to actually execute this can be difficult to grasp at first. But a healthy understanding of the stereo spectrum, stereo imaging. And panning is an outright necessity.

6. You Think Loudness Is Just About Limiting

Oh, the loudness war. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that loudness is achieved solely through limiting. Loudness can be achieved in plenty of stages: mastering, mixing, and even in the composition stage.

Certain sounds are inherently tougher to get loud when compared to others. Knowing the difference can save you a lot of wasted energy and effort in the pursuit of making commercially loud music.

To go deeper on loudness, check out The Ultimate Guide to the Loudness War.

7. You Are Lazy with Automation

If you want your mix to move, bounce, groove, and vibe, you are going to have to use automation. And lots of it. Not just in drawing automation nodes, but in auto-filters, auto-panners, tremolos. And responsive effects like sidechain, LFO routing, and so much more.

Without automation, our music would be dull, static, and dead.

8. You Don’t Use a Reference Track

Our ears need to get recalibrated every once in a while. Mixing without a reference track is a sure-fire way to get truly lost in your own project. From ear fatigue to terrible mixing decisions, avoiding a reference track is asking for trouble.

Better yet, make sure to never skip breaks. This puts your ears through a clinical form of torture and is often the number one reason why mixes lack proper gain structure and generally lack a sense of professionalism and commercial viability.

The Solution: 12 Fundamentals of Creating a Professional Sounding Mix & Master

I’m going to run through what I consider to be the 12 fundamentals of achieving a professional sound. They are:

1. Gain Structure
2. Saturation
3. Subtractive EQ
4. Compression
5. Sidechain
6. Additive EQ
7. Reverb
8. Effects
9. Limiting
10. Layering
11. Referencing
12. Mastering

Let’s run through each of them.

1. Gain Structure

Gain structure, basically, is the art of volume, and man, is it important. In fact, in my opinion, it’s THE most important mixing tool at your disposal. And hey, even Porter Robinson agrees. In a Reddit AMA, he said:

“Getting the relative volume levels of each instrument correct is a more important task than EQing. New producers often prefer a sound after it’s been EQed and in many cases it’s only because the levels have changed.” - Porter Robinson

There is so much inside of gain structure (beyond setting your volume). An absolutely awesome place to start is simply by anchoring your kick drum. Next time you start a mix, anchor your kick at -6 or -8 dB, and once it’s set, you never touch that again.

That means if you want to raise the volume of your kick, you lower everything else. You don’t blindly raise the kick drum, then have to raise everything else, and end up with no headroom. We’ll talk a little more about gain structure when we get to referencing.

2. Saturation

Saturation is the number one most underrated mixing tool. In short, saturation adds harmonic frequencies both above and below your source sound. But achieving a full, analog, and warm sounding mix has everything to do with proper use of saturation.

Because saturation plugins are emulating analog equipment, the plugins you use here really, really, really matter. The right plugins and flavors of saturation will help you achieve that full, analog, and warm sounding mix.

For me, I have a ton of favorite saturation plugins and use cases for all of them. Here are 3 to get you started.

The DSP Reviver has some absolutely sick third-order harmonics that sound fantastic on drums. You can slap it on your drum bus or even on individual drum sounds, and it’s affordable. Not expensive at all.

The Soundtoys Decapitator is pretty much the best all-purpose saturator on the market. It gives you 5 different settings or emulations you can toggle through. My favorite is probably the E setting (which stands for EMI) because it’s the brightest and zestiest saturation. At the end of the day it’s probably my favorite saturation plugin. And while it isn’t cheap on its own, when you get it as part of the Soundtoys Bundle, it’s super affordable.

Softube Saturation Knob is free. You can literally Google this and have a really fantastic saturation plugin for nothing. It might require an email or something, but otherwise it’s free.

If you want to see saturation in action before we move on, this is worth a few minutes of your time.

Saturation works differently depending on where you put it. On a drum bus it adds glue and punch. On a synth lead it adds bite and presence. On a master bus it makes everything feel a little warmer. Experiment with placement, not just amount.

3. Subtractive EQ

Subtractive (or reductive) EQ is significantly more important than additive EQ. A lot of professional engineers will tell you: amateurs boost, professionals cut. And while hard to grasp at first, this means that if you want the vocal to cut through, try removing frequencies from other instruments before boosting the vocal itself.

Boosting everything will result in a mix that lacks headroom and struggles to balance competing sounds because everything fights for the same space.

Understanding the art of EQ and how to make room for multiple sounds is an absolute necessity in making professional music. Here are a few quick EQ tips:

• 2 small moves is almost always better than 1 bigger move, because it allows you to be more gentle and subtle.
• In general, shoot for narrow bumps in the low end and wide in the high end. If you’re overly wide in the low end it can really mess up a mix. In the high end, being too narrow will just be too sharp and kind of hurt the ears.
• Use FabFilter Pro-Q’s auto-gain feature so you can take volume out of the equation. That means you can just hear coloration changes instead of the volume changes that naturally come with EQ moves.
• When you want to boost something, try finding its fundamental frequency and once you’ve found it, instead of boosting it, try removing that frequency from a conflicting sound. This is just one of many examples of how to make room in a mix by cutting.

4. Compression

Compression will decrease your dynamic range by helping remove the transient peaks of your instruments. Overall, it can create a perceivably louder mix, tighten up live performances, and help glue sounds together. But it’s also one of the most overused techniques on this list.

When it comes to actually using compression, the majority of sounds we use in electronic music (the samples, the digital synths, working in MIDI) are not overly dynamic to begin with. So using compression on fairly flat sounds is actually kind of pointless. Focus on compressing live sounds like vocals, guitar licks, sax solos rather than the digital stuff.

Pro Tip: Before reaching for a compressor on a synth or sample, ask yourself: is this actually dynamic? If the waveform looks pretty flat already, compression isn’t going to do much. Gain staging and saturation will serve you better.

5. Sidechain

Sidechain has exploded into the electronic dance music world as an effect, even though it was originally meant to be a mixing tool. Understanding that difference (sidechain as a mixing tool vs. sidechain as a pumping effect) was a HUGE realization that helped propel me into making polished-sounding music.

And you can sidechain against anything in your mix to help create additional room. You aren’t limited to only your kick drum. You can sidechain against your vocal, leads, synths, instruments. And you can even sidechain some of your effects (like reverbs and delays) to get them out of the way of sounds you want listeners to focus on.

6. Additive EQ

Additive EQ speaks to the reality that digital EQs and analog-emulated EQs are very different from each other. This means that the way you create color in your mixes can drastically vary simply based on the type of EQ you use. After all, do you want a clean, digital sound? Or a dirty, analog sound? The answer depends on who you are as a producer and the end result you’re trying to create.

Some of my favorite additive EQ plugins:

• VEQ4
• API 550
• Pultec EQP1A
• Sonalksis SV517 MK2 Stereo EQ
• Soundtoys Sie-Q

7. Reverb

Reverb is my favorite mixing tool because it means translating your mix to a real world environment. Think about it. Reverb exists everywhere. It’s literally in every room you’ve ever spent time in: every gymnasium, every amphitheater, every bar, every club, every classroom, every space you’ve ever been in. You can’t avoid it.

And that means the absence of reverb is actually highly artificial. Your mix will sound extremely unnatural by NOT putting reverb in your mix.

This makes reverb an absolute necessity. And the way you use the various reverbs available to you (rooms, plates, halls, chambers, springs) matters. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Rooms: a cohesive gel for almost everything in your mix
• Plates: for things in the front of your mix
• Halls: for things in the back of your mix
• Springs: for guitars and bass instruments
• Chambers: for claps/snares

8. Effects

Effects can be a real love-hate thing for mixing engineers. They provide a lot of potential polish, gloss, and movement to mixes that would otherwise sound dull and flat. But at the same time, effects can cause huge problems in your mix. Sloppy reverbs and delays, overly dramatic tremolos, auto-panners bouncing around the entire stereo spectrum: things get messy in a hurry.

Treating and processing your effects with extreme detail can single-handedly clean up your track, liven up your mix, and provide the much-needed polish, movement. And energy that most amateur mixes lack.

9. Limiting

Limiting is often thought of as a mastering-only tool. But in reality, the purposes of limiting stretch far beyond mastering. A lot of professional mixing engineers use limiting to flatten sub-bass layers. Limiting can also be the best way to flatten out transient peaks, which in turn helps maximize your headroom.

10. Layering

Layering isn’t traditionally thought of as a mixing tool, but man, can it help with mixing. A lot of times, poor sound choice layered with great sound choice can still result in a beautiful finished product. Plus, layering has two major components: layering to sound unique, and layering to sound full, huge, and warm.

This distinction is critical when it comes to using layering in your mixes. But just like effects, layering can create a ton of problems which require everything from saturation, EQ, reverb, compression. And various other effects to be fixed.

11. Referencing

Referencing is everything. If you only do one thing because of this article, do this: create a reference playlist with 10 of your all-time favorite, best-produced tracks (wav files would be ideal). Next, listen to those tracks everywhere.

On every system you possibly can. Then, when you sit down to make music, treat your reference playlist as a bible. Your music isn’t done until the gain structure, coloration, loudness. And energy of your music matches at least a few of your references. This is a lot easier said than done, but it’s surely some of the best advice I was ever given.

For more on getting your levels right, check out The Ultimate Guide to Loudness.

12. Mastering

Mastering can be difficult, but it isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. That said, slapping an Ozone preset onto your music will do substantially more damage than good. You need to learn why you are applying things like the Sonnox Inflator, EQ matching, and limiting to your mastering processing chain. Once you learn why, you’ll see that mastering is simply a way to accentuate what you already have.

Mastering is kind of like becoming rich. It just amplifies who you already are. If you were a jerk before getting rich, you’ll be even more of a jerk with a lot of money. Masters are exactly the same. If your mix is sub-par, mastering will showcase that even more.

But if your mix is beautiful, polished, and balanced, mastering will amplify that.

If you want to see the full mastering process broken down before getting into Mix Master Flow, this walkthrough is worth your time.

Every one of these 12 fundamentals connects to the others. Nail gain structure and everything else gets easier. Understand reverb and your mixes start sounding like they exist in a real space. It builds on itself, step by step.

The Ultimate Solution: Mix Master Flow

Mix Master Flow is a phenomenal collection of 9 start-to-finish style mixdowns, stem masters. And masters, plus 50 technical mixing & mastering video tips.

All in, we’re talking about over 115 no-bullsh*t videos spanning over 25 hours worth of content.

Hands down, this is the most extensive course we’ve ever put together (aside from the Masterclass).

Here is everything the course includes:

• 3 start-to-finish style Mixdown Courses
• 3 start-to-finish style Stem Mastering Courses
• 3 start-to-finish style Mastering Courses
• 50 Technical Mixing & Mastering HD Video Tips
• Bonus: Live Q&A Session w/ the Hyperbits Team
• Bonus: The Ultimate Mixing Sample Pack
• Bonus: Mixing Presets & Channel Strips for Ableton & Logic
• Bonus: Mixing Templates for Ableton & Logic
• Bonus: Access to 3 Recorded Hyperbits Workshops

You will literally watch me (and our entire team) mix, stem master. And master 9 projects entirely from scratch, and along the way, you’ll discover some super cool stuff, including:

• How to use advanced processing chains to make polished-sounding music
• How to literally transform your productions with saturation and distortion
• How to properly use automation to create attention-grabbing professional transitions
• How to organize and optimize your workflow as a mixing engineer
• How to use both reductive and additive EQ to achieve separation and distinction
• How to process synths, basses, drums, and vocals so they sit PERFECTLY in the mix
• How to use reference tracks to make your track stand up to the big boys
• How to actually set up your mastering chain
• How to achieve commercial loudness without sacrificing quality and clarity
• How to use a little-known technique called “EQ matching” to sound more like your favorite producer
• How to use gain structure to anchor your kick and properly achieve headroom
• How to use effects (like delay, tremolo, auto-panners, and auto-filters) to excite your mix
• How to use layering as an engineer to fill up your productions
• How to use room, plate, and hall reverbs to polish your productions

And this doesn’t even include everything you’ll get from the 50 technical tips (which are highly actionable, technical production techniques you can apply in your project instantly).

After getting through Mix Master Flow, ALL of your music will sound WAY better. It’ll be clearer, sharper, and more dynamic. It’ll be more powerful while also being clean, thanks to the proper use of reductive EQ and saturation.

You’ll be able to get back to creating ideas (because you won’t be focusing on the technical side of things), you’ll construct music with more movement, life. And energy, and most importantly, you’ll learn to mix and master your own tracks, saving you time and money.

Have any questions about mixing and mastering? Questions about Mix Master Flow? Get in touch.

Related tool: Start to Finish with Anden: Produce a dancefloor-ready melodic techno track from blank session to master.

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