Mastering audio for publishing is an intimidating task. When you read the literature, most people say that you need to leave the mastering to the professionals, if you can. In my experience, they are right: whenever, in past project, I relied on professional mastering engineers to produce my masters, I was astonished by the result. However, there are situations (zero-budget projects being one of them ;-) where you will want to master yourself.

Enter the world of the mastering plugins. There are 3 or 4 excellent mastering plugins in the market, and Izotope's Ozone5 is one of them. Since I'm an Ozone5 user, let me share 2 experiences with you - I hope they can help or inspire someone. Enjoy.

Matching EQ: if you want your production to sound like this or that reference track, the Ozone5 Matching EQ is your tool. It's dead easy: you create 2 snapshots - one from the reference track and one from your track that you are producing. Set the first snapshot as 'reference' and the second one as 'target'. Click MATCH, and Ozone5 will propose an EQ curve (the red one in the figure to the left), which you can soften and smooth (you don't want to apply an EQ curve that is too edgy during mastering). I've used a lot of matching EQ on my last project, and it gives great results.

Maximizing. Or: fighting the loudness war. A lot, and I mean A LOT, has been written about the subject of loudness. In Ozone5, you literally see the compression happening (upper pane in the figure to the left), and you just play with your threshold to control the amount of maximizing compression. I used a peak of -0.6dB and an average RMS during the signature parts of the track of -4.0dB. I'm still way above the K-12 norm, I must admit, but hey I was producing club tracks - right?

I've been doing a lot of mixing the last couple of weeks, and the DAW I'm using is Cubase 6.5
Since I have two screens in my studio, the mixing setup is shown in the figure below. Here are some of my experiences, tips and tricks:

• I reserve mixing jobs for a separate day, on which I do nothing but mixing. Context-swapping between creating and mixing is very hard
• Don't mix more than 1 hour in one lapse - take oxygen breaks, take a walk, etc.
• Prepare your mix by exporting all VST instrument tracks as wav files and import them back in your mixing project. The mixing project should no longer contain VST tracks. I had the nasty experience earlier this week where the most recent version of a project would no longer open and I had not bounced its VST tracks. Bouncing your VST tracks will also protect your music against non-compatible VST instrument future versions.
• I use Group Tracks for drums, bass, guitar, lead synth, pads/strings, fills, lead vocals and backing vocals, and move the mixing view to the left screen (see below).
• create a mixing template with a rythm delay, space delay, 3sec plate reverb and large reverb - you'll use these FX on most of your tracks anyway
• The mixing itself. I try to work in 4 dimensions: volume, frequency, pan and FX. Frequency is, at least in my experience, the hardest one: detecting conflicting frequencies can be tought and requires full concentration. In the FX dimension, you can of course go as wild as you want, but for me, track-defining FX should be in BEFORE the mixing stage. During mixing, I add the 'pepper and salt'. Sometimes with some NI TheFinger or StutterEdit, both amazing products.
• Maybe the thing that works best for me is to approach mixing in iterations of 1 week: when I have a version of a mix of which I'm satisfied, I revisit it not earlier than 1 week (2 weeks is better ;-). You will be amazed by what a pair of fresh ears can hear on a track that you thought was OK... (I think this is called 'mixing bias')
  

Enjoy!