A pre-amp is usually the first thing that your microphone or instrument signal hits. It's the thing that takes that very low-level

signal and raises it up so that it's ready for regular amplification.

Sounds simple, but people actually get really into pre-amps, and pre-amps can actually make a pretty significant difference in how a recording sounds.

Fortunately, most modern preamps sound pretty good, but if you want to get obsessed,

well, you definitely can. And the Welcome to Strong Songs, a Podcasts, a Podcasts about Music. I'm your host Kirk Hamilton and as always I'm so glad that you join me to talk about music. I'm your host Kirk Hamilton and as always I'm so glad

that you join me to talk about music recorded through Neve preamps, music recorded

through Helios preamps, and sometimes music recorded through just some

preamp that didn't have a known brand. We've got a pretty cool

episode for you this time around with a bunch of different songs to talk about,

so find a comfortable place to sit, turn up the volume, and enjoy this show. It is remarkable how many things I'm still learning about home

recording. I've been making music in my home studio for more than a decade I caught a

whole album mostly in a home studio and yet

there are times when I will learn things that I feel like any beginning music

engineering student would have learned and if I had taken music engineering as a course I

probably would have already known and while it's

possible to learn a lot about music production from the internet I mean YouTube is incredible

it's an incredible resource for learning how to do EQ and compression and mixing and

how to set up a home studio, it's still no substitute

for having a course where someone actually teaches you thing by thing and it makes it possible

to have these kind of big gaps in your knowledge. For instance, here's a confession for people who think I know everything because I make a

podcast about this kind of stuff. I didn't really know what balanced cables were for in a studio.

I always kind of just used instrument cables for everything because I always had a lot of those lying around.

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