"I have 6 vectors. Gauge1, Gauge2, Gauge3..."
As you see, you can't address these variables easily as Matlab can't interpret variable names dynamically for ordinary arrays. Instead create a single array gauges of size [N,6]. Then the above operation becomes trivial--
gauges=bsxfun(@minus,gauges,gauges(1,:));
See
doc bsxfun % for details on the singleton expansion to subtract the one row from the rest
