An elderly couple, friends of mine, decided to get married recently. Both of them were very joyous that they had found happiness again after their previous very happy marriages, each of which ended in the death of their spouse. The bride heard a song on the radio that expressed her feelings perfectly, and she asked me to sing it at their wedding. I gladly agreed, even though I had never heard the song before.

The name of the song was The Keeper of the Stars, written by Dickey Lee , Danny Mayo, and Karen Staley. It had been made popular by a country music singer, Tracy Byrd. After hearing it, I agreed that the words were perfect for this ceremony, and singing it at the wedding was a very special experience for the three of us.

Afterwards, many people expressed to me what a wonderful job I had done in performing it, so I decided to record it and make it available for friends to download. Here it is:

Technical Details

Some may be interested in the details of how this recording was made. I performed the song using a recorded soundtrack played through a Behringer X18 mixer, which I used to add a bit of delay to thicken the vocal a little and some reverb to make the vocal larger and help it fit better into the music track. The microphone was a CAD 195 condenser, my favorite mike for recording vocals because of its clear sound, its ability to pick up a voice when the vocalist is not really close to the mike, and its low-frequency response and proximity effect, which really helps a male singer with a somewhat thin voice, such as mine.

I mixed and mastered the recording using Reaper, and I sent the vocal, the accompaniment tracks, stereo delay tracks, and the stereo reverb tracks separately to the PC. Then I added a bit more reverb to the music tracks and used another plugin to widen the stereo image a bit. I also added some EQ to my vocal to brighten it up a bit and remove some mid-range "mud."