Dunno, I always thought pre-master is a process rather than mixing technique. I understand it as making the track as you'd normally do, but then doing a mastering attempt in order to discover mixing mistakes, that you can fix before sending the mixdown to mastering engineer / before doing the final mastering.

...I might be wrong on that though.

Putting stuff before mastering chain tends to be more commonly known as "stereo bus processing" (term comes from the older days of mixing consoles) Some people like to put slight compression at that stage. ...to pre-bake it for the limiter.

Edit: Also be carefiul there. If done wrong, mastering engineer might want to kill ya...

I use a pre master track because i wanted to check certain buss effects that are in PRE fader settings, such as the buss reverb.

If i pull the premaster down, i can hear all the PRE effect settings.

I got this idea when ever i was using reaper to mix. Reason doesn't have the same functionality as reaper, so to emulate it i routed my groups to a pre master.

Rather than muting individual channels, i just mute the pre master. And that's kind of the basis for my grouping philosophy.

One other thing i do is a low cut and a hi cut on the pre master. in reason, low filter and hi filters are set to a max at 20hz and 20khz. And that's like the maximum i think their eq's go, which you don't need to go higher than that.



And after writing this, and thinking back....I find that the premaster channels allows for a completely dry mix to be achieved, because there's no other signal other than your inputs that are going into it. This maybe a function of reason, but if i were to render out my pre master track, i'd get all my input signals with no buss/aux effects on it.

So to me, it separates the mix a bit further with the buss/aux/send effects and the input signals.

But outside of the filters, i don't mess with it.