Most mixing advice is folklore. Somebody heard that every club master hits -7 LUFS, that your sub should be dead mono, that wider is better, and the advice gets repeated until it sounds like physics. We wanted the actual numbers. So we measured 563 released techno and house tracks, signed and distributed records across six styles, and extracted loudness, true peak, spectral balance, stereo image and tempo from every one of them. This is the data we use to calibrate TrackSensei's scoring engine, and we are publishing the headline numbers because several of them disagree with the advice you will find in forums, and the ones that agree come with a condition the forums leave out. If you produce club music, some of what follows will probably change how you finish your next track.
The corpus: 563 released tracks, six styles, one pipeline
Every track in the corpus is a finished, released master: label releases and established artists, not bedroom demos. The breakdown: house (54 tracks), tech house (38), groove techno in the Berlin style (57), melodic techno (56), peak-time techno (308) and hard techno (50). Each file went through the same analysis pipeline TrackSensei runs in your browser: integrated LUFS and true peak per the ITU-R BS.1770 family, a Bark-weighted frequency spectrum, multiband stereo correlation, onset and tempo detection, and kick analysis. For every metric we report the median and the middle 50 percent of tracks (the P25 to P75 range), so one outlier release never skews a number.
Finding 1: club loudness is a window per style, not one number
Ask a forum how loud a techno master should be and the answer is -7 LUFS, maybe -6, with the implication that anything quieter gets buried in a DJ set. The corpus says that number is right for the loudest techno styles and too hot for house, tech house and melodic techno. On a standard stereo LUFS meter, the one in your limiter or your metering plugin, hard techno medians at -6.9 LUFS integrated. Peak-time techno and groove techno both median at -7.7. House lands at -8.0, and tech house and melodic techno both sit at -8.8. The spread is the actual finding. The middle half of released house runs from -9.0 to -7.1 LUFS, melodic techno from -9.9 to -8.0, hard techno from -8.0 to -6.4. A melodic techno record pushed to the hard techno number is around 2 LU louder than most of its own genre, and a hard techno record left at the melodic number plays 2 LU softer than the records around it in a set.
One note on scale before you hold these numbers against a TrackSensei report. TrackSensei measures integrated loudness on the mono sum of left and right, which reads about 3.3 LU lower than a standard stereo meter on a club master: a house track your limiter shows at -8.0 LUFS reads around -11.3 in the report. The loudness windows inside the tool are on that internal scale, so -11.3 in a house report means you are on the house median, not 3 LU under it. Both readings come from the same corpus measurement, and everywhere else in this article LUFS means the stereo meter value.
Why does the -7 number travel so well? Partly because it is close to the truth for the loudest techno, and partly because perceived loudness in a club comes from spectral balance and transient control more than from the integrated figure, so a -8 house master next to a -7 hard techno master does not sound a full LU softer. The practical takeaway: pick the window for your style and finish inside it. House, tech house and melodic techno live around -8 to -9 LUFS, and pushing one of those to -7 to win a number costs you the kick transient that actually makes a system move. Peak-time, groove and hard techno do run at -7 to -8, and a master left at -10 in those styles plays noticeably softer in a set. We wrote more about targets per platform in how loud should your master be.
Finding 2: released club masters run their true peak hot
This one surprised us. The textbook rule says keep your true peak at or under -1 dBTP so lossy encoders do not clip. The corpus shows released club music ignores that rule completely: the median true peak is above 0 dBTP in every single style. House medians at +1.08 dBTP, tech house at +1.22, peak-time techno at +0.96. Only groove techno stays close to the ceiling at +0.47.
Be careful with this finding. It does not mean true peak is irrelevant; it means the people mastering club records prioritize density on a big system over codec safety, because the primary playback target is a CDJ playing a WAV, not a streaming codec. If your release strategy is Spotify first, the -1 dBTP advice still protects you from encoder clipping. If you are bouncing for DJs, know that the records you are competing with are not leaving that decibel on the table.
Finding 3: the low end is 78 to 92 percent of the energy, and the bass band beats the sub
Sum the energy below 250 Hz in a released techno track and you get almost the whole track. In groove techno the median is striking: 39.9 percent of total energy lives in the sub band (20 to 60 Hz) and another 51.9 percent in the bass band (60 to 250 Hz). That leaves about 8 percent for everything else: hats, synths, vocals, air. House is the least extreme style at 78 percent below 250 Hz, which still leaves less than a quarter of the energy for everything you would call "the music". The pattern contains a subtlety most producers get backwards. The bass band carries more energy than the pure sub in five of the six styles. Released masters get their weight from the 60 to 250 Hz region, the kick body and bass harmonics, not from an enormous 20 to 60 Hz sub. Melodic techno is the one exception where the sub band edges ahead.
If your mixes feel thin next to references even though your sub meter is healthy, this is usually why: the missing weight is kick body and bass harmonics between 60 and 250 Hz, the exact region beginners carve out because someone told them it is "mud". There is real mud up there too, which is why the move is controlled shaping rather than blanket cuts; we covered that trap in why does my mix sound muddy.
Finding 4: the mono low end rule is real, and stricter than the forums say
Collapse a released techno master to mono and measure how much loudness you lose: the median loss is between 0.18 and 0.46 LU depending on style. The common rule of thumb tolerates up to a full 1 LU of mono loss. Real released masters are two to five times stricter than that. Groove techno is the most disciplined of all: a median mono loss of just 0.18 LU. Sub-band stereo correlation tells the same story, with a median between 0.998 and 1.0, fully mono for all practical purposes, in every style we measured. The pros are not debating whether to mono the low end. They have simply all done it.
Finding 5: released masters are narrower than you think
On a 0 to 1 stereo width scale, every style in the corpus medians between 0.16 and 0.24. Groove techno is the narrowest at 0.16, house the widest at 0.24, and the styles famous for huge atmospheres, like melodic techno, still median at just 0.20. Big-sounding records get their size from arrangement, reverb depth and contrast, not from pushing a stereo widener until the correlation meter complains. If your width number is double these medians, you are most likely paying for it in mono compatibility on the dancefloor, where many systems sum the low end anyway.
Finding 6: tempo and kick tuning, the quick hits
A few smaller numbers worth keeping in your head. Techno has sped up: peak-time medians at 131 BPM with the middle half reaching 136, groove techno medians at 140 and hard techno at 141. House holds steady at 126. Kick fundamentals cluster between 48 and 62 Hz in every style: the medians sit at 51 to 54 Hz for house, melodic and peak-time techno, with groove techno a touch higher at 56.5 Hz. If your kick's fundamental sits at 45 Hz because a tutorial said lower equals heavier, you are fighting physics that released records simply avoid: the energy belongs where the system can reproduce it.
What this means for your next mix
Taken together, the corpus describes a finishing style that is unfashionable to say out loud: loudness that follows the style rather than one forum number, a strictly mono low end, modest stereo width, and weight built in the 60 to 250 Hz band rather than the sub. If you want a checklist version: master into your style's window on a stereo meter, roughly -8 to -9 LUFS for house, tech house and melodic techno and -7 to -8 for peak-time, groove and hard techno, and spend whatever you do not push into the limiter on transients. Keep everything below roughly 120 Hz mono and verify the whole master loses less than half an LU in mono. Check that your bass band carries at least as much energy as your sub band. Keep width around 0.2 and create size with arrangement instead. Tune your kick fundamental into the 48 to 62 Hz pocket. And read the full mixing walkthroughs in how to mix techno and how to mix house with these numbers in hand.
Methodology and limits
All 563 tracks are released masters analyzed at 44.1 kHz through TrackSensei's own DSP pipeline: ITU-style integrated LUFS and true peak, Bark-weighted band energies, multiband correlation, onset density, tempo and kick measurements. Loudness was measured twice per track, once on the stereo channels the way a standard meter does it and once on the mono sum the way TrackSensei scores it; the LUFS figures above are the stereo meter readings, and the tool-scale column in the first chart is the mono-sum reading. We report medians and P25 to P75 ranges, never means, so outliers cannot drag the numbers. Limits worth naming: the corpus skews toward techno (471 of 563 tracks), the style boundaries are editorial judgments, and a median is a description of what is released, not a law about what sounds good. Plenty of great records live outside these ranges. The point of the data is to replace folklore with a measured starting point.
These are exactly the targets TrackSensei scores against. Upload a track, plus your Ableton project if you have one, on the analyzer and you will see your own LUFS, true peak, band energies, mono loss and width compared to the same corpus, with concrete notes on what to change. Your track against 563 released records, in under two minutes.