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Paul Mason, from Chelmer Village in Essex, was the first of the Essex Chronicle competition winners to come through our doors and record with us. When we first made contact with Paul he told us that it had been his wife Margie who had entered the competition on his behalf. She has been Paul's biggest fan for many years because Paul is a songwriter and has crafted many of his own songs but had never had the opportunity to record in a professional environment...... until now! Paul's musical past has taken him from his early days playing guitar and singing in folk bands to arranging for choirs (which he still does) and writing his own material. His genre of choice is mainly ballads which he writes using backing from piano or keyboards. We were sent a rough recording of 'Strong Love' that he had put onto minidisc. We had a further discussion and chatted about different ways of approaching the work. After looking at the possibility of treating it as a Phil Collins style ballad, with some percussion, bass and guitars, we decided that a better approach would be to treat the song as a torch ballad. So, Paul arrived and laid down the first track - piano. We chose the Roland A90 grand piano setting (which, incidentally is superbly sampled from a Steinway). Next up, we tracked the vocal, capturing Mr Mason's baritone with our trusty Rode valve microphone. In order to allow the song to breath we resisted the temptation to add too much in the way of embellishment and settled for some subtle string and flute parts plus some light percussion on the choruses. Paul seemed delighted with the outcome of his session and is anticipating some positive feedback from his daughter in Australia who will be listening to the MP3 files below via the internet. Now that 'Strong Love' has been committed to CD, Paul has indicated that he will be returning to Middle C at some stage to do some more of his own songs. We look forward to welcoming him again very soon.
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Original song written by P Mason ©2004 |
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