After recording pretty much full time sense 2001, I've made about one hundred billion mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes of all has involved preamps. Yes, I know that just about every recording forum on the planet goes on and on and on about how important preamps are. They talk and talk and talk about the differences between one Neve 1073 clone and another Neve 1073 clone. This is all fine and dandy. If everything in your recording chain is so perfect that the difference between one 1073 clone and another 1073 clone becomes significant, than you are SMOKING!! In fact, if your chain is that good, your next recording should have no problem competing with major label recordings. You should probably look into booking major label caliber talent immediately.

The truth is there are very few singers who deserve to get to sing through a $2,000 preamp. Let me reword that a little bit. There are very few singers who will sound noticeably “better” through X preamp. A bad singer sounds bad through anything. The only time, in my opinion, a great preamp even matters is when the singers is GREAT! When I say “GREAT”, I mean that this singer sends chills down your spine. I mean you really think you've got something completely magical in this person and you feel lucky to record them. Few “local” singers are going to have what it takes.

If you think you are going to make up for a piss poor performer by switching to a $2,000 preamp, you are out of your mind. It's just a volume knob!!!

My First Preamp

When I do something, I try to do it right. I always end up falling short of the goal, but that doesn't stop me from going all out. I was reading on forums back in 2001 trying to figure out the gear I needed to start my recording rig. I stumbled on some threads about preamps. I was led to believe that if I didn't have a great, professional preamp costing over $1,000 per channel, I would never be able to crank out pro recordings.

I remember when it came time to record my first couple of bands, I always made a big deal about the fact that I had a Vintech 1272 Neve clone. I had the “secret weapon death ray” that no other studio in the world could hope to compete with. No, I had a volume knob.

When listening to my early recordings, they sound like any other dumbass's first recordings. They sound horrible. I have tons of EQ and in general, I basically had no idea what I was doing. I can say, without a doubt, the $1,000 of cash I dumped on the Vintech 1272 before I even know how to plugin my audio interface had made absolutely good for the entire first year of my recording career.

Lesson: Jerks on forums like to repeat something they hear without any knowledge of the subject and without taking into consideration your situation. They are just repeating words they don't understand and sucking you in to something you may not want to do.

Preamp Mistake #1

I like to think like a businessman every once in a while (if I was a real businessman I wouldn't be recording at all!!). When a construction company owner upgrades his/her tools, the motivation is because it's going to make the company money or save the company money in the long run.

Well, no preamp upgrade (or any gear upgrade for that matter) has every allowed me to make an immediate increase in the amount of money I charge for my services. In other words, my clients didn't seam to think that my recording quality had improved based only on gear.

The way engineers talk in forums, you'd think that if you listened to a catalog of my mixes, it would be brutally obvious where I made preamp upgrades. This just hasn't happened.

Lesson: Local bands couldn't hear the difference in my new gear and weren't willing to pay extra for it. Interestingly enough, taking the time to really produce a band without any real regard for time has had a dramatic and immediate improvement in my recording quality.

Preamp Mistake #2

These days I'm very picky about who I work with. There was a day when I recorded anyone and everyone I could . Most of the time you found people with mediocre talent and mediocre gear. In other words, the sound these bands made was...mediocre (or substandard when compared to immensely talented major label bands).

Well, I ended up recording one of the better local bands who happened to sound damn good. They were much tighter than what I was used to at the time and every member of that band took lots of pride in his instrument. The guitars turned out great.

It turns out that I ended up getting lots and lots of compliments for my guitar tone on that recording from local guys. Other bands I had recorded told me they were the best guitars I had ever recorded.

It's interesting because it's not like I had anything to do with the tone of those guitars. I put a 57 on a speaker and ran it into a Mackie preamp. That's it.

So why was I getting compliments for the tone captured by a SM 57 and a Mackie preamp when I had recorded many other guitars with Royer R121 ribbon mics and Vintech Neve 1272 preamps? It's simple. The sound was better before it even hit the amp. In other words, the guitar player sounded better.

Lesson: The source is WAY more important than the preamp. I'm not saying that a person should not have great preamps. I'm just saying that it only makes sense to invest a ton of cash into preamps if the engineer is consistently working with musicians capable of putting out great tone to begin with. Even then, the results are fairly subtle.

Preamp Mistake #3

When I was at the Wagener Workshop back in Jan 06, we had the chance to listen to just about every preamp under the sun. After Wagener had taught us specifically what to listen for, it was obvious that a great preamp is going to do something to the sound. Of course, we ended up using drastically different preamps on every source we recorded. Meaning, that if you wanted to use exactly what Wagener used, you'd have to dump about $30,000 in preamps to get this selection. Of course, you have to understand the kind situation Wagener had. He has a real facility for making records with great isolation between is live room and control room. He has a thunderous understanding of audio engineer and producing. He's put more hours into recording than I have probably been alive. He was working with people who were top notch musicians and had driving 5 hours to record with Wagener. In fact, they rented out a house while recording their record with Wagener.

When I came home I was all excited about applying my new knowledge. Well, I quickly realized that my recording facility was completely inadequate when compared to Wagener's facility. Then I realized that the musicians I was dealing with were not on the same level as the musicians that Wagener was dealing with.

Not even accounting for musicianship, I noticed that drummers were showing up with year old drum heads. Bass players were content with recording with strings from 6 months ago. I was recording guitar players using fizzy amps. Basically, I was dealing with amateurs who were expecting professional results.

Of course, Wagener had amazingly accurate monitoring. He used ADAM SA-3s that cost around $5k for the pair. His room was not mega mega treated, but what you heard in the mix position was exactly what you heard in the car....everyone's car. I certainly didn't have this (I don't have this now). Focusing on preamps when your mixing environment is inaccurate is about like buying a Lamborgini while you live in a mobile home.

Lesson: It's easy to get excited about preamps when you are out of your context. If your reality is not so perfect, a preamp isn't going to make all that difference. A pro preamp has no business recording a musician who behaves like an amateur.

Preamp Mistake #4

Going back to the Wagener Workshop, Wagener would let us (the 4 dudes attending the workshop) listen to each track one at a time. In fact, he would leave the room while we listened for about 30 minutes. We, as a group, would try to pick out what we liked. The differences were very subtle between most preamps.

When we had our time to listen to vocal mics is where it got really interesting, actually. We listened to all of them over and over eventually deciding on the one or two that we liked (out of about 12 mics). Immediately, Wagener came in and listened. He basically said “YIKES!” on one of our favorite mics. In other words, there was no way in hell that Wagener would ever use that mic in this situation even though all the workshop attendees did like it.

Lesson: We all have our own way of hearing. What one person loves another person is going to hate. What one person loves may eventually be a total nitemare for him/her later. Example: Maybe one mic sounds nice, bright, and clear making other mics sound dull and boring. Then, we may find that this mic is causing excessive sibilance on other systems.

Preamp Mistake #5

Going back to the vocal preamp shootout. I remember that Wagener loved the sound of one certain preamp. It was the dullest one of the bunch. It had kind of an almost muddy sound to it. I thought he was crazy, but I didn't open my mouth because I trusted the dude. Well, the entire time we tracked it didn't make sense why we would want such a dull preamp. (It was somebody's version of a 1272). Well, I figured it out down the road. Wagener picked a dark mic and a very dark preamp. He recorded with a good 12dB of reduction on the vocal with a Distressor. I thought this was A LOT of compression, but I went with it. When mix time came, he added A LOT more compression. I want to see he hit it with another 12dB of reduction, but it's been a year and a half. So basically, Wagener completely crushed the vocal with compression. Of course, compression brings up the quiet stuff and make the loud stuff not so loud. Using this much compression essentially brought the sound of the reverb and noise in the room up by 24dB (which explains why Wagener went well out of his way to deaden the vocals as much as possible). Using this much compression, will bring up the high end and sibilance in a hurry.

The only way of making sure that sibilance was not killing us after putting 24dB of compression on the vocal was to make sure that it wasn't really there to begin with. Of course, he probably took a billion other precautions in regard to avoiding painful sibilance, but I was too busy learning the big deal stuff to notice the subtle things.

Lesson: A big reason the pros disagree on what gear they like has a lot to do with how they twist the knobs. I'm guessing that most guys aren't using 24dB of reduction from their compressor on a lead vocal. I'd read about R&B guys using less than 2dB of compression on a vocal. I have no doubts that a guy using only 2dB of compression would have drastically different room acoustics requirements and microphone / preamp requirements. The hard part is deciding how you need to turn the knobs for a given band and deciding which gear would work best with the knobs set that way. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I thought everything sounded dull while tracking. Towards the very end of mixing, Wagener ended up slapping a Manley EQ on the 2Bus and boosted the high end quite a bit. The entire mix (which was sort of thick and dull) became exciting.

Conclusion

If you are new to this and someone is talking you into dumping $1,000-2,000 on a fancy mic preamps, you may want to re-evaluate your priorities. If you are working with substandard musicians, you are an idiot if you dump thousands into mic preamps. If you have horrendous acoustics, you can work around it, but you will be fighting your room every step of the way (both in tracking and in mixing). The preamp will not help with room acoustics, unfortunately. If you are trying to mix in a horrendous room but are spending thousands on preamp , I think my analogy holds true: “It's like buying a Lamborgini while living in a mobile home”.