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 many dB should a mastered song be?

How loud should your master be? Shoot for about -23 LUFS for a mix, or -6db on an analog meter. For mastering, -14 LUFS is the best level for streaming, as it will fit the loudness targets for the majority of streaming sources. With these targets, you're good to go!

How do you give 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!