Headroom for Mastering is the amount of space (in dB) a mixing engineer will leave for a mastering engineer to properly process and alter an audio signal. Typically, leaving 3 – 6dB of headroom will be enough room for a mastering engineer to master a track.

How loud should you be before mastering?

How Loud Should My Track Be Before Mastering? If you want to send your mix off to get mastered, you should aim for around -6dB Peak, and anywhere from -23 dBFS RMS or LUFS to -18 dBFS RMS or LUFS average.

How do I make more headroom for mastering?

Watching both is the key to good headroom. You should aim to have the peak levels of your sound hitting around -9 or -10 dBFS at the loudest with the average hovering around -18 dBFS. Keep to that guideline while tracking, mixing with plugins and exporting files and you'll never have headroom issues again!