MARY LAUREN

Mary Lauren's Vocals --- 
Inspiring Recording Moments


I would like to share some of the inspiration and wonderful times that have created this CD in its final form - particularly, Mary Lauren’s vocals.

Johnny and I had finished and engineered all the musicians' work into a final version. We gave a master CD to Mary, who listened to it and gifted us with the inspiration to add a female unison vocal to Song #6, “Silent Snow Secret Snow” - at the time, only Johnny's vocals had been recorded. Mary’s harmonies were already present on seven of the eight vocal songs, but not this one.

So, we set up the studio for a weekend recording session – and the results in “Silent Snow Secret Snow” of Mary's and Johnny's unison vocals speak for themselves. This is in addition to Michael Levine's singular violin performance.

Mary surprised us and came into the studio ready with additional vocals for five more of the eight songs. So, we had two warm and wonderful weekend work sessions to record a whole lot of multitracks with her new vocals.

Of particular note are the vocals she added in unison with the saxophone on two 45-second passages in Song #5, “Queen of Dreams.”

I was privileged to engineer this female vocal and saxophone unison into what it has become, and it stands unequalled in my lifetime of music listening – or my 6,800 LP and 400 CD collection.

Mary is also credited with arranging in “Queen of Dreams,” as she created this soaring, lilting melody – and taught it to Sam Levine, the saxophonist.

For these added vocals we used three different microphones simultaneously – in order for weaknesses or dynamic characteristics in any particular microphone to be filled out by the other two. While non-standard, my hope was to use as little processing as possible – this could make correction for microphone characteristics unnecessary, and it did work that way.

What you hear of Mary Lauren's singing is her voice as sung – we tried and rejected processing, EQ, and compression. We did add reverb.

Mary simply does not need any of the usual vocal processing – her beautiful voice shines through on its own.


--- Kevin Schuster : Producer and Engineer

© Johnny blackburn 1998-2017