The best master starts with the best input. Before you upload anything, the single most impactful thing you can do is leave headroom - bounce your mix so its peaks land around -6 dB (or lower), with no limiter or clipper slammed across the master bus. Give mastering room to work and it can add loudness, weight and polish cleanly. Hand it a mix already crushed against 0 dBFS and there is nothing left to master - every move is fighting a distorted, brick-walled signal.
What level should I upload at?
Aim for mix peaks around -6 dB, and anywhere down to about -12 dB is completely fine. There is no need to be precise - the goal is simply that nothing clips and the peaks are not jammed against the ceiling. Sauce sets the final loudness during mastering, so a quieter upload never means a quieter master.
Headroom is not the same as "quiet"
This trips people up. A mix peaking at -6 dB is not a weak or quiet mix - it is a full, finished mix with breathing room at the top. Its loudness (how big it feels) comes from your balance, compression and arrangement, not from how close the peaks get to 0. You can have a punchy, dense, exciting mix that still peaks at -6 dB. That is exactly what you want to send.
How to leave headroom in your DAW
The mistake most producers make is pulling down only the master fader at the very end. That lowers the final number, but every channel and sub-bus feeding it can still be clipping internally, and you bake that distortion in. Do it properly instead:
- Turn down at the source. Pull your individual tracks or group/bus faders down a few dB - not just the master - so nothing clips on the way through. Gain staging from the start is far easier than fixing it at the end.
- Remove master-bus limiting. Take any limiter, maximizer or clipper off your master bus before you bounce. That is the mastering stage's job - leave it out so you are not stacking two limiters.
- Check the master meter. Play the loudest section and confirm the master peaks sit around -6 dB with no red clip lights anywhere in the chain.
- Bounce a 24-bit WAV. Keep your session's native sample rate, and never master from an MP3. See how to export a WAV for mastering.
For the deeper theory on peak level vs. loudness and exactly how much room to leave, read gain staging and headroom.
Exporting stems or trackouts?
If you print stems (or full trackouts) to master or mix from, give each one headroom too, and print them all at the same fixed fader levels with no master-bus processing. When the stems are summed back together they should recreate your mix without clipping. A single hot stem can push the sum over 0 even if each one looked fine alone.
No clean bounce? Let Sauce prep it
If your mix is already a little hot, or you are not confident about gain staging, you do not have to redo it by hand. Run Sauce Mix Fix first: it balances the mix, tames mud and harshness, and leaves the correct headroom automatically - a proper master-ready pre-master - before you send it to the mastering stage. Upload, hit Fix, then master. That is the whole workflow, and it keeps your track from ever being "too loud for the master."
Try it on your own track. Bounce a mix with a little headroom, upload it to Sauce Mastering, and hear it mastered for streaming - your first master is free, no plugins, no card.