When should you Normalize, if ever?

[gainstages]

normalizing is a waste of time, and could potentially just make your recording much worse. don't do it! I made the mistake of believing it was good to normalize everything at first, but it didn't take me too long to realize that it's NOT the thing to do.

the level playing field idea is ridiculous! let's make our backing vocal tracks as loud as possible before we mix, so that we can then turn them down when we mix.... frankly, the last thing you want in a good mix is for everything to be the same volume level, and normalizing doesn't mean everything will be the same volume anyway, it just means that the peaks will be the same - and peak volume has little to do with how loud something sounds, it is the rms (average) volume that relates more to how loud something sounds.

if you are getting levels that are way to low when recording, then record at a higher volume to begin with (but leave yourself some headroom).

Using mixing to balance the volume levels, not normalizing them.

i won't even begin to talk about gainstaging and problems running through plugs and making everything clip because you have no headroom...