Jewelz to Mastering How To Master Your Own Music When you think of a mastering engineer, you think of someone tucked away in a studio filled with hardware and expensive equipment. To many, mastering can seem like a dark art. With the advancements made with music production tools, all you need is a set of basic plugins that your DAW offers and a few guidelines on how to tackle the mastering process. In this article, I am going to go over a step-by-step process on how you can use your native DAW plugins to master your own tracks. Pick a reference track Before you even begin to start to master your song, you need to pick out a reference track. Mastering is all about making small adjustments to the entire mix. When you make these small adjustments, it can be difficult to see the overall picture of how you want your track to sound like. Having this reference track gives you a chance to check to see if the processes that you are doing to your song are helping you get closer to the sound that