Mastering to the Industry - 'Who Am I?' vs It's Reference!

Well... I hope you're ready for yet another blog frenzy ladies and gentlemen cause this blog is one of 4 to come today! Although this blog is going to be rather simple, I thought I'd put my current progression with the process of mastering to the test against my reference track for 'Who Am I?'. Let's get into it!

Trying something new

So after I initially mastered 'Who Am I?' I put it to the test inside my Dj software (Pioneer's rekordbox) to compare volume levels and waveform size in software that is seperate to a D.A.W (in my case, Ableton Live 10 Suite). To both my surprise and disappointment, my master was not anywhere near loud enough despite being on the verge of clipping inside Pro Tools (where I mastered it). Now looking back on it, this was probably not the best way to go about this but it worked in the end. In order to increase the level over the overall mix without clipping it, I took my master bounce from Pro Tools, slapped it into Ableton, Ramped up the clip gain by about 4dB and then slapped yet another limiter on the overall mix. Needless to say, she thicc...

My original track 'Who Am I?' compared to the reference track it was based off by BIJOU and Dr. Fresch 'Hello' in Ableton Live.

LUFS - Loudness units full scale

The goal towards mastering this track technically was to hit -13 LUFS as this is the general industry standard for popular platforms such as Spotify and iTunes. However, 'Who Am I?' was just a tad too loud to be eligible for these standards and will need to be pulled down a few dB if I was to put it up there (thank god I'm not)

Levels - 'Who Am I?' clocking in at roughly -9.5 > -10.5 LUFS on iZotope Insight

Overall, I was actually pleasantly surprised as to how similar in size these two tracks are now as I originally through that I had gone a little overboard with my master in terms of cranking the level! However, when the two tracks are played back at the same level the reference track is actually still slightly louder than my own! It makes me wonder, is this really how industry standard EDM gets mastered? In terms of my own mastering ability though, I believe I have come a long way since my track 'Glitch' at the start of the trimester. My lecturer for mastering, Guy Gray has been a serious help with this as I originally struggled a lot with mastering to begin with and to look back to the beginning of this trimester to where I knew nothing about mastering in general to being able to independently master my own tracks to (or really close to) industry standard reference tracks blows me away.