Mastering Your Track in GarageBand

Mastering is the last stage before your track leaves your hands: a light, final pass applied to the whole mix together, aimed at translation and consistency rather than fixing individual tracks.

Mastering is not remixing

If something's fundamentally wrong with the mix — an instrument too loud, a vocal buried — fix that in the mix itself first. Mastering makes a good mix sound finished; it won't rescue a mix with real balance problems.

Working on the master bus

Apply mastering effects to your project's overall output — the master track or master bus — rather than to individual tracks. Everything you do here affects the whole song equally.

EQ: gentle, broad corrections

A light EQ pass on the master bus can address overall tonal issues — maybe the whole mix feels slightly muddy in the low-mids, or a touch dull up top. Master bus EQ moves should be subtle; broad, gentle adjustments (a couple of dB, wide bandwidth) rather than the more surgical, aggressive EQ moves you might use on an individual track.

Compression: gluing the mix together

A light compressor on the master bus can make the whole mix feel more cohesive — a low ratio (around 2:1) and a fairly slow attack, just enough to even out the overall dynamics without obviously squashing anything. You should struggle to point to exactly what the compression did; you should just notice the mix feels a bit more "together."

Limiting: controlling final loudness

A limiter is a compressor with an extremely high ratio — it doesn't just reduce loud peaks, it prevents them from crossing a ceiling you set entirely. Placed last in your master chain, a limiter is what brings your track's overall loudness up to a competitive level without clipping.

Set your ceiling with a small safety margin below 0 dB (many mastering engineers target roughly -1 dB) to leave headroom for whatever platform your track ends up on next, since streaming services and other conversions can introduce tiny peaks of their own.

Reference tracks

Before finalizing, compare your master against a professionally released track in a similar style, at matched volume. This is one of the fastest ways to catch a master that's too bright, too dull, too quiet, or too aggressively limited — differences that are hard to hear in isolation become obvious next to a reference.

What's next

A finished master is ready to leave GarageBand — the next lesson covers vocal production in more depth: doubling, harmonies, and other techniques for a genuinely polished, professional-sounding lead vocal.