If you were to go back to the beginning of your mixing/mastering journey, whats the biggest advice you would give yourself, and why?

Is anyone here looking to have some new songs mastered? I'm always looking for new material to work on, but I need musicians like you all since I don't make any music myself and otherwise have nothing to do.

Hi again, everyone! I worked on a mix+master adjustment of a 2021 track and am running into problems again, mostly of the PC performance kind, what makes committing first necessary. I wanted to ask for your opinion before I do so - if the only persisting problem is the bass side-chains or if you might think that I already kind of over-treated that track to death and/or need to adjust stuff like basses' dynamic EQs first. I spent about 5 or 6 days working on the track lately, most of the time micro-editing values and often not being able to playback properly, first because of NVIDIA driver problem, then probably by using too much heavy plugins together, I already went to maximum buffer size and closed/disabled whatever I could in Windows or in the DAW's cue channels (Analysis/Reference/2nd headphone Sonarworks) before going back into the project the last times. While micro-editing those values to get rid of that damn ugly distortion in the basses when they coincide with vocals, the overall feel of the basses changed multiple times, current version not sounding the very ideal way and maybe already being too over-processed to a lackluster extent, it's hard to say. I'm also not sure if the VocalSynth2 affected tracks (the buzzing synths) sound "attractive enough" at that moment. And those VocalSynth2 tracks and the Ozone Dynamic EQ instances on the basses are causing the most of the resource load on the system that still can be saved by bouncing the single tracks... Other than that I'd probably like at the end to add some Oxygen to the Tops, but otherwise I'm content with that master. What would you say regarding those concerns or what other comments do you have? Can you maybe even recognize the clashing regions in the frequency range that should be easily adjustable between those Basses and VOX or other sounds? Am I over-limiting maybe? I'm sorry for not having labeled the single channels properly, the legend on screenshot is: red for Kicks, yellow for Tops, brown-orange for Drum-loops and stuff like Claps, green for Basses, pink for VOX, violet/dark-pink for VocalSynth2, cyan for a Synth-loop.

Any experienced mastering engineers in here that have pushed a -6 lufs song out via DSP's? Whats the best headroom to output to avoid issues?

Title says everything. Seen a master request for a given mix that is already -6lufs. So can you master that or not? I am having a go at it and increasing the loudness, but will probably not submit it to them. Question is could/should I normalise -4db down to -10db then master? Yes the other way is to ask them to mix it lower in volume to -10. Not sure if they had any takers for the master yet. Over to the masters here ...... thoughts please 🤔