So this is love — with Steve Conway

Описание: Something a little different for Valentine's Day — ‘So This Is Love’ was written by Al Hoffman, Mack David, and Jerry Livingston for Walt Disney’s “Cinderella”, 1950.

I have always loved this song, which was a duet in the original film, and when this record came into my collection I fell in love with this solo version by Steve Conway. I decided to turn it into a duet again.

He sang Cinderella’s line, so for the first verse I sang the prince’s part. For a bit of variation on the second time round, I wrote my own harmonies, trying to keep them in the style of the era.

Steve Conway (1920-1952) was a crooner of the 1940s, counting Doris Day, Bob Hope and Noël Coward among his fans, he was compared to Bing Crosby and Al Bowlly, and like the latter, his stellar career was cut short by an early death.

What is crooning?
The introduction of the microphone in the 1920s enabled a new style of singing to emerge — singers could lean in close so that every subtlest nuance could be picked up to create a soft, intimate effect that sounded almost as though they were whispering directly into the listener’s ear. It was very different to the louder, projected voices that had been necessary up until that point; the new sound could never have been heard over an orchestra without the microphone.

This was an interesting lesson for me, because although I’ve enjoyed copying the crooning style for fun before, I’ve never tried recording it.

To match Conway’s tone, I had to sing with the tiniest fraction of my voice and get much closer to the microphone than usual. Singing so quietly made me a bit nervous — the voice didn’t feel fully supported. But I was amazed at how well it sounded on the recording. I did no editing on the sound.

I recorded this with a ribbon microphone, a modernised digital version of the type of microphone that probably would have been used at the time this record was made. It has two microphones facing at right-angles to each other, one for the gramophone horn and one for me. It was made by Sontronics.