I must admit that the difference was not mega huge between the preamps. There were certain differences, but nothing glaringly obvious. One of guys attending the workshop was a little upset that he didn't hear much of a difference (and this guy has been a musician longer than I've been alive). The differences were certainly extremely subtle. Michael left the room so we could listen to all the tracks and figure out what we liked. It turned out that Wagener didn't agree with us, actually. In fact, many of us had different tastes. When it came to testing out numerous preamps for the shootout, everyone had slightly different tastes.

I must admit that any of the preamps sounded VERY good because the source, room, and microphone used were all very very good. All of the preamps would have worked, in my opinion. Wagener pointed out a few things. At first, I was thinking, the difference between these pres is so small, that I'm not sure that I care.

Wagener asked ?What's this going to sound like with 10 guitar tracks layered?? (or something to that effect). In other words, the small effects of that preamp are going to add up. If you've done any serious mixing, you know it's easy for the guitars (or any instrument for that matter) to be lost in ?big cloud of nothing?. This is something that EQ really can't fix. It's just a character of certain pres to make the sound less focused, more distant, and less clear. Then again, other preamps are more focused and have more harmonic content. For distorted electric guitar, we wanted as much focus as possible. You want to hear ?stuff? added to the guitar that makes it sound bigger and meaner, according to Wagener. The winner ended up being a Chandler TG-2 on guitar. I must admit that I didn't hear an amazing difference at first. Michael said on the first day that the biggest part of engineering is knowing what to listen for. We wanted to know why Michael chose the TG-2 as his favorite even though none of us picked it. He picked out a specific chord that demonstrated what he was talking about. We spent 10 minutes listening to the same chord looping on at least 10 different preamps.

It's amazing how the difference gets bigger the more and more you listen to the tracks. You begin to heard subtle differences in texture that you didn't immediately see at first. By the end of the guitar preamps tests, I was hearing glaring differences in tone because my ear had adjusted to the level of detail we were listening for and Wagener had pointed out what to listen for.

It's important to note that in the big boy world, you don't fix anything. You get it right. In fact, I have a feeling that mixing is going to be EXTREMELY EASY compared to what I have to do deal with in my home studio. I'm used to fixing things when mixing. I used to look at mixing as fixing sounds, but over the years I've come to understand that mixing is much more creative. In a setting like this, I'd say that mixing is 99% creative because the tracks simply don't need to be fixed. In this setting, an extreme attention to detail is placed on tracking the instruments perfectly when going to tape or disk. In this setting, the preamp does play an important role. Some day, I'd like to record a song twice with the best and worst preamps for each particular track. I'm curious as to how ?bad? the song using the worst sounding preamps would sound. I'm guessing, not that bad, but not that good either. For example, when we were doing our snare shootout, it became obvious that the slow preamps were losing A LOT of high end attack. In mixing, you'd have to use ?tricks? to fix that (assuming you wanted the high end attac). Or, you could use the right preamp for the job and not have to fix anything.

I thought the differences in sound on the various preamps when micing the snare top was glaringly obvious. Without a doubt, I think you HAVE to use a fast preamp on top of the snare if you are looking for nice attack. There may be instances where you don't want that kind of attack and then you could use a preamp that's a little slower, but maybe adds in other ways to the sound.

Things to look for in a preamp:

• Distance ? If you listened critically between the various tracks, some tracks sound a little distant and some sound directly in your face. This is a subtle thing, especially on just one instrument, but in a mix can make a big difference.

• Focus ? You could also call this clarity, but they are not the same things. Focus is also kind of like ?cutting through a mix?. After Michael showed us what to listen for, I could totally see how using the TG-2 on multiple guitar tracks could make a very big difference when it comes to mix time. The TG-2 was very focused. Again, this is not necessarily an EQ or frequency thing. It's something else.

• Room ? Without a doubt some preamps had more of the room sound than other preamps. In other words you could hear the reflections of the sound bouncing around the room more on some preamps than others. It all comes down to personal taste, but Michael (so far anyway) has went for the ?in your face? sound everytime. He wants everything to sound as close as possible when it comes to pres (again, so far).

• Speed ? Michael said there are ?peak preamps? and ?RMS preamps?. In other words, some preamps are much better for transients such as drums or percussion and others are good for constant stuff like guitars or bass. In peak preamps, you are usually looking for a fast preamp. It was quite clear when doing our snare shootout that certain pres had MUCH more high end crack than others. For technical guys, this is called ?slew rate?. The faster a preamps is, the more attack you get out of a snare hit, for example. A slower preamp tends to not let as much snare crack though, but may have more snare body. Typically, the slower preamps, for whatever reason, had more harmonic content which could be great for bass or drums.

Winner - Snare

In our test, in Wagener's room, using a Pearl Green Beauty snare, we ended up going with the MindPrint DTC preamp. It had the most aggressive high end attack (which means it was very fast). Again, the race was close and there were a number of great preamps that sounded very very good, but the MindPrint DTC had what we were looking for. All of us agreed that the Mindprint was our favorite on snare...even Wagener.

Winner ? Guitar

In our test, using a Wagener's room, a Randall M4 module based guitar amp through the matching Randall cabinet with Vintage 30s and a Royer R121 micing up the snare, we chose the Chandler TG-2 preamp. Again, the preamps were much closer on guitar than they were on snare top. In the end, the preamp with the most harmonic texture and most in your face sound won. There were other pres that did nice things but either were a little too distant or or a little too lifeless. Ironically, the MindPrint, which was our favorite on snare did not end up in the top 10 on guitar.

Honerable Mention

So far, if I had to pick one microphone preamp for everything, I'd have to go with the GML 8304 4 channel mic preamp. It has been in the top 3 on both snare and guitar. It has texture (not as much as the Chandler stuff) but is also very fast. So if I could only afford one preamp that I've heard so far, I'd go with GML.