Reverb across the entire mix will soften all the edges and bind parts together. This is fine if it's the sound you're going for, but a lot of trance (and the sound I prefer, at least) tends to be cleaner and more punchy.

It's definitely a valid trick, and one to try in most cases, but I've not used it yet. Generally what you're going for with a quick and dirty bit of trance mastering is to get it *loud* (that is, played at the same volume as the unmastered track, it sounds much louder, even if both are fully normalised) and *banging*.

For this you can't beat a bit of harsh limiting (say 5dB), and a fast release. The limiting will make it loud, and the fast release will give you some nasty fat gain pumping that'll make engineers cringe and dancefloors go mental... :roll:

If your EQ balance is wrong at the mixdown stage, what can be done at the mastering stage is very, very limited. The best possible advice is to get it right while you still have the parts available for separate processing. Don't trust to some mysterious guy with lots of boxes and lights - most of the time they just bang it through some compression and limiting and hit record.

Taking your parts to a professional for *them* to mixdown... now that *can* be a good idea.

Ooh, just thought... most people end up with a very centralised, mono image in their mix. You can alleviate that using reverbs, stereo delays on parts and a bit of creative panning (be careful - most clubs have mono soundsystems - you can end up with parts disappearing because they're chaining the left channel when you put your lead on the right hand side!) but if you have to do something about it at the mastering stage, there are stereo enhancer plugins available that just widen the stereo image. THey're not a cure all, but they can help.