I was saddened to hear of the passing in May of another friend from my younger years, Carol Burnette (nee Snyder). I knew Carol from the “Phileos” Youth Choir at Severn Baptist Church during the late ’70s.
As is often the case when you hear such news, I found myself recollecting about experiences in those days and remembered I had come across a recording we had done with some members of the group including Carol when digitizing my Reel-to-Reel archive.
The song was “Welcome Back to Jesus” which was made popular in 1975 by the singer Evie Tornquist released on her “Evie Again” album.
Digging through my Archive, I found the recording we had made — again with no detailed notes on the date or the players. But it was on the very first reel of Maxell tape we purchased and began recording with the TEAC A-2340SX 4-channel deck. Being on that reel, it was most likely recorded in late 1977.
There were three tracks recorded for the song. There was Stereo mix of the Instruments and a Vocal track. Since you cannot hear any vocals on the Instrumental tracks, I’m thinking that those were recorded without any singing initially and the vocals were over-dubbed afterwards.
Without notes from the session, I have to make some guesses on the Players. Brian Baker is playing Banjo, Garry O’Dell playing either 6 String or 12 Strings Acoustic Guitar, Rich Strickland playing either 6 String Guitar or Electric Bass or I am the one playing Bass. The Vocalists I hear are Carol Snyder, Garry O’Dell and Rich Strickland.
I spent a little bit of time cleaning up the original recording and re-mixing. We tended to go a bit overboard on adding reverb to vocals back then. So through some new digital magic I was able to ‘deverb’ the reverb some on the Vocal track. Also with recent developments in audio processing it is also possible to ‘unmix’ certain instruments from mixed track. The bass was pretty low in the original Instrumental mix, so I was able to ‘unmix’ it out of those tracks to a track of its own, clean it up some and bring it up in the remix.
Rest in peace, Carol.