It’s better to be safe than sorry, so don’t worry about adding a little more silence than you think you need.

However, they can’t add content that’s missing from the file you send them. If your file’s too long, your mastering engineer can apply cuts and fades as necessary. Once your track has been limited by your mastering engineer, quiet delays and reverb tails become more apparent, and you don’t want to cut them off accidentally when you export your track.

Leaving a few bars of silence at the beginning of your track ensures that you don’t accidentally omit reverse effects and risers, while leaving 4-8 bars of silence at the end of your track allows delays and reverb tails to die out. Leave silence at beginning and end of your track.

They’ll help you streamline the mastering process and also ensure you get your masters back as soon as possible. Following these steps will allow your mastering engineer to do their best work. There are actually 5 steps you should to take before sending your track off to a mastering engineer, but luckily they’re all quite simple, and easy to pull off. I have mastering clients ask me all the time, “what do I need to do to my song before I send it to you?” This is a great question because it’s not necessarily obvious, unless you’re a mastering engineer. The effects a mastering engineer applies to your track will vary depending on the engineer, and may very well be what cause you to favor one mastering engineer over the other. It’s also become the expectation that a mastering engineer provides a few final enhancements to a track, which mainly include EQ adjustments, as well as the application of color, compression and sometimes other effects as well. With streaming services now dominating the music industry, the digital file that you upload to said services is referred to as the 'master file.' For vinyl distribution, this means creating a vinyl lacquer master, and back in the day of CDs, this meant making a glass CD master.

Mastering is the process of creating a master copy of a song from which all other duplicates of the recording are made.

How to export songs from studio one