Here’s a video that came from The Music Producer’s Handbook that shows the differences in how the mixes sound from rehearsal, basic tracks, all overdubs, final mix and mastered track. The song is “Feedback And Distortion” which I produced for the second SNEW album called We Do What We Want.

You can hear that the rough mixes are fairly close to the final mix, but the final mastered track (done by the great Eddy Schreyer at Oasis Mastering) is definitely a lot louder.