To the young folks who've always lived in the digital age Mastering is hard to grasp. If you have the tools and the skills Mastering really is not a required extra step. The reason being is that you are recording in the same medium that the final product will be. Remember in the olden days ( we won't talk about when you recorded direct to the cutting lathe ) all recording was done to tape whether 1 or 24 tracks it was still tape. We listened to records. These two formats had entirely different characteristics. It was the Mastering Engineers job to get the material from tape to the Master disc for replication without altering the material.

John
ESI Gigaport HD+
Lenovo Turion II /4 Gig Ram/ Win7x64 be
15.6" Monitor
"The only Band is a Real Band"
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