well i was self taught for the first 8 years or so and then went to school to study recording/production - to see how it's done in the "real" studio with "real" musicians hah.. i was surprised to see that my process didn't change that much, i was already doing the same at home..

it's mostly like this for me

1) "composition" - with all the midi equipment, arrangement, mad ideas and creativity. i do everything in logic audio. all the editing and tweaking here. basically anything i want to do to get a sound or an arrangement.

2) recording - i record every instrument to audio tracks in logic. get the best possible signal level, normalize everything, mostly record everything dry without effects/processors. tracks go like: 1-kick, 2-snare, 3-hihat, 4-percussion, 5-bass, 6-synth, 7-synth, 8-sample... etc.

3) mixdown - throw all the midi sequences away and work with the dry recorded audio tracks. just mix the track, because everything should be arranged and edited in the first stage. sometimes of course small audio edits and even arrangement improvements. i use logics processors, vst:s and external effect/processor units to compress, eq, reverb, delay and whatever every audio track individually and get the balances right.

4) pre-mastering - i record a single wav file from the mixdown, and do whatever needed.. if its going to vinyl, just a little eq:ing and limiting. if it's going to net or a promo-cd or whatever, i do what i can with my home equipment: multiband compression, eq, exciters.. not much really, because i regard the mixdown stage as one of the most important stages of the whole process - everything should already sound very clear/good after it, there's not much that can be saved with mastering in my opinion if any of the previous stages failed

the beauty of it all is that you can concentrate on one thing per stage. the trick is to learn what can be done in every stage of the process. and i always try to sound as good as possible from the first stage, and not to trust that "i can fix this in the mix"..