After you’ve recorded the perfect song, you’re only halfway there! Mixing is where the magic really happens, and where the most of your time is likely to be spent. Getting the perfect mix is a challenge, but with this information, professional quality mixing equipment at home, and will power, this will be completely within your reach!

Keep in mind that mastering goes hand-in-hand with mixing. The truth is, if your song is mixed poorly, most likely amateur level mastering isn’t going to do any good for it – in fact, it probably makes it even worse.
So before starting to experiment with mastering, you need to learn to mix. Your song needs to sound as good and balanced as possible before going to the mastering stage .The thing is, professional mastering makes great sounding mix to sound outstanding.There are a wide range of VST plugins that can be used for mastering: brickwall limiters, single band compressors, multiband compressors, equalizers, stereo enhancers etc. and there’s even a bunch of presets to get you started. I have to say though that there really isn’t a “one button solution” or “setting that fits for all” -quick fix for mastering. Each mix is different and that’s why the mastering tools needs to be chosen and tweaked according the situation – everything depends on the audio material you have and what you wan’t to achieve with the mastering. That defines the tools and settings you need to use. Sometimes, you may just need a little help of a limiter in the master channel to do the job for you and if you can make your mix sound good with it, it’s ok. The thing is, you just need to learn to use your ears.

Lot of producers and professionals say that mastering should be left to mastering engineers and that you shouldn’t master your songs by yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing. I agree, because mastering engineers have the skills, professional equipment, right kind of listening environment (which is ESSENTIAL), trained ears and usually a years of experience so they pretty much know what can be done (if any) to enhance the quality of your mix. But let’s say you don’t have a professional engineer around and you need your music complete? You have to start somewhere and my suggestion is that you research as much information that you can about mixing your tracks down.
There are several programs like fruity loops, pro tools, and audacity, to name a few, that allow you to mix your tracks down perfectly. If you need help on using these programs, I suggest choosing one and start messing around in that program and get some books on it. Once you get the hang of mastering your own tracks there will be nothing you cannot do!