The point: if your monitoring isn't right, nothing will be right.
And on the waves stuff, I don't care one way or another about the l3. But the l1 and l2 are very crunchy sounding. I've never liked the results from either of those.
I usually mix to a certain nebulous point of "doneness", and then drop my typical mastering chain on the master bus and finish mixing into that, though I of course will end up adjusting the settings on the master in the process when necessary. Maybe I'll bypass it once in a while for a sanity check. What happens from there depends on what I'm doing.Now, I can pop something on the strereo outs insert, I find myself jumping between the real mix and the plug-in version. Oh, I know it's all wrong, but what happens is the mix proper gets tailored as I go and the settings on the plug-in gets tailored, too as at different points I switch in and out - 10 pence worth.................. I learn more about the mastering software this way - like pulling back on it
i.e. when I burn that file to a disc, which software do I need to separate those tracks back out, and how do I keep them contiguous on the disc without extra blank space between?