DIGITAL MUSIC
Bobby Love is a Toronto-based electronic artist and producer blending house and R&B.
Check out music at Soundcloud.com/madebybobbylove.
By Bobby Love
The Importance of
Referencing When Mixing
& Mastering
T
wo years ago I stumbled upon a
plug-in that allows you to instanta-
neously reference songs with your
own music inside your working
project. It has improved my mixing
and mastering like you wouldn’t believe and
it has now become a staple in my creative
process. There are many plug-ins available
on the market and all of them do a great job,
but you can also do this yourself inside of any
DAW to immediately notice problems in your
mix and master.
Here’s a very simple rundown of how you
can do it yourself:
1. Bounce your track out of your DAW (with
your mastering chain on) once you feel your
song is “finished.”
2. Start a new project and load two audio
tracks, one with your track and one with a ref-
erence track of your choice. (You can load as
many songs as you want for reference.) Pick a
song that is generally similar in genre/sound/
vibe to what you’re going for. This can get
complicated when you’re like me and you’re
unsure of what genre you’re making or where
your music fits in, so I generally just grab three
or four songs I like from a mixing or mastering
perspective and go from there.
3. Do your best to match the volume of the
tracks by going back and forth between the
two songs by soloing them individually, or load
a LUFS meter onto your mix bus and do your
best to match the RMS levels of both tracks.
4. Once the levels have been matched,
you can actually start the referencing part.
Essentially, this just involves soloing each
track whilst listening back and forth between
the two songs, paying