Bob Weir and long-time Grateful Dead tech guru and Weir’s personal Front of House engineer, Mike McGinn, developed the principle behind the Real Deal in an effort to crank Bob’s acoustic guitar loud enough in the live mix while retaining the natural, unplugged sound of the instrument. The technology they developed to achieve this goal involves using a pair of complimentary filters to split the acoustic guitar signal into low and high frequency bands, with independent preamp gain applied to each signal path. A mastering stage then combines the various inputs into a single mono output, resulting in a powerful world-class acoustic guitar tone.