Wet - with processing.
Dry - without processing.
Preamp: For al intensive purposes, a preamp is used to match the impedance (amplify/attenuate the signal levels) of a specific signal with an input device. IE. amplifying a mic-level signal enough to be recorded on tape.
In other words, unless you're plugging in a reference line-level signal, you need a preamp.
All microphones, pickups, etc. will need a preamp of some kind to bring the signal level up to the point where it's usable.
Most mixers/tape recorders have basic preamps built in.
Very expensive external preamps will give a better sound, generally, than the [crap] they build into most cheap mixers.
Busses are used to route signals in a 'matrix' fashion to different places on/in a mixer.
If you look at many live consoles, you'll see that they're called 24x8x2s or something similar. That means it has 24 inputs, 8 busses, and 2 main output channels.
The idea with bussing is that you can take several channels of vocals, several of drums, several of instruments, etc. and mix the to bus pairs - that way if you want to turn down the whole drum set you just grab its two bus faders instead of fiddling with every mixer channel individually. Basically, you mix 24 channels down to 8, then the 8 down to 2.
-OR- you can mix down these elements to individual busses, and record each bus output on a multitrack tape.
I know I'm not explaining how it works, but these are two possible uses for bussing.
Slap-back is a short, single echo, like Camn said.
[This message has been edited by Dex (edited 04-13-2000).]
