My latest CD, "Playing with Angels" is the only studio CD I've ever heard of where most of the songs were recorded straight to digital. I just plugged the Korg into the soundcard, opened up Cool Edit 2000 and pressed record. Most of the songs were recorded in one take. A few of the recordings have a different, somewhat older sounding vibe, like "Work All Day". Those songs were recorded and edited using Music Shop 1.0 on a Macintosh. They were played through a Yamaha synthesizer. But they were all mastered digitally to Cool Edit.

Mastering directly to digital is a brilliant way to eliminate distortion because there is no tape involved. The song is saved as a WAV file and dumped straight to CD.

My first two CDs were recorded on a four-track and then mastered to DAT (Digital Audio Tapes). The quality is very high on the first CD, "Differential", because of the care I took in isolating the live piano and using noise reduction technology. The second CD, "A Moment in Time" was recorded to four-track from an electronic piano, so source isolation was not an issue. However, MIDI was not used because I lacked the knowledge and funds to use it (but the piano itself was MIDI compatible). 1998s "Grasp" was totally MIDI-based, with a combination of three recording techniques (and that's why it took so long to finish): 1) digitized music played via MIDI into a real piano with a MIDI controller, 2) digitized music played via MIDI into an electronic piano, and 3) pure digital music played through a Yahama synthesizer.

You already know that mastering to digital is the very best way to go. For the first four CDs, I mastered my CDs to DAT tapes. DAT technology has been an industry standard for professional recording artists since the 80s. A CD copied from a DAT master is exactly identical to the original recording. DAT recording equipment is more expensive and the resulting digital file is extremely large, to reflect every nuance of the original sound source. None of my CDs have any static, noise, compression, or anything else except the pure music that was intended for you to hear in the first place.