What do you intentionally do (if anything) when mixing to not interfere with mastering (or to explicitly prepare the track for mastering)?

If you are mixing a track and know that either you or someone else will be doing mastering next, do you do anything differently, or do you mix a track with the intention to have it sound completely finished / radio ready?

I've heard an engineer say that they try to leave an "open" sounding mix to hand off to the mastering engineer, which I take to mean, they don't apply "glue compression", and leave a lot of separation, more than you ultimately want, between the tracks.

For example:
Do you intentionally leave (level/volume) headroom, if so how much?

Do you not put limiting or compression on the master bus?

Do you EQ tracks a bit more mildly, less depth in the bass than you want to hear, or anything like that? Or perhaps sharper mids than you want because you know mastering will likely subdue them with compression and limiting that gets applied?

Posted May 15, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

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