Steve Mansour

Behind The Scenes #10
Please Come Home For Christmas
(link to video)

I always love working on harmony vocals. Harmonies can be my favorite part of a song. They can underscore the mood, or create a mood that can be powerful and moving. To work out harmonies for a song, I usually sing along with the vocal melody trying to stumble on something I like. Sometimes, the harmony naturally follows the chords or melody, but they can also be a counterpoint melody of their own. When working out harmony part for someone else to sing, I try to constrain it to something comfortable in the their vocal range. This year I tried something a bit different. Suzie Clark has a good range, so I wanted to try doing some Queen-style harmonies. That means that Suzie and I would each sing every part (the low harmony, the mid harmony, and the high harmony) on separate tracks. Then we combine them to produce a lush composite. So, I worked out some harmonies, and recorded myself doing each part. Then Suzy came over and we recorded her singing each part. I like to listen to the harmonies with everything else muted. It's something that's easy to do when mixing a song, but most people never get to hear that sort of thing. I thought you might find it kinda fun to hear just the harmonies, by themselves. Here's a few seconds of the harmonies in the first verse.

Isolated harmony tracks:

James Reily played the harmonica solo on this video, making it the fourth time he's been on one of my Christmas songs. He has been a tremendous musician to work with over the years, whether it is playing live, working in the studio, or helping to arrange or produce original songs. He is very talented at all of it. He is currently finishing post-production on his own jazz album called Obstacles featuring some of the great players and friends he's worked with over the years. The album has five original pieces and two classic covers. Every musical thing James does is definitely worth listening to. Look for Obstacles in early 2022.

For those who are familiar with my guitars you will probably not recognize the Telecaster-style guitar I used for the two rhythm parts on this song. That guitar is a prototype being readied for manufacture by Ken Bauer, who also happens to be the keyboardist for Gray Music Factory. Ken doesn't like guitars that weigh a lot (I can sympathize as I've played many all-night gigs with my Les Paul Deluxe... it weighs a ton). He asked me to give his prototype a try so I used it for this song. It is light as a feather! He must have done some serious hollowing to the body. The neck action was comfortable and easy on the fingers (though I did make a request for the neck itself to be slightly thinner). It also has some really unique active filters that provide great volume and tone variations. It sounded really good to me on this song. You will probably see me playing more Ken Bauer guitars in the future!

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