Hymn Accompaniments

Professional organist John Keys of Nottingham Parish Church and producer Wendy Williams started by recording four CDs which are now part of the Core set. This was to help out a friend, Paul, who at the time was a joiner by day at the time, but a Minister in a small Spiritualist Church (in the grounds of Newstead Abbey): he is now their main preacher. Despite the name of the church, they follow a very traditional C of E style, and use a very old version of Hymns Ancient & Modern. They no longer had an organist, the organ had become unplayable, and they had managed for a while with a few hymns which someone had recorded onto cassettes, which were almost worn out.

Paul asked if John and Wendy could help out by doing some recordings, and they bought their very first recording equipment especially for that. As the recordings were coming to a close, it occurred to Wendy that there must be many other churches in that situation these days, and that they ought to do some more recording. The question then was how to get the recordings noticed. In 2005, Wendy Williams approached Brian Clegg, who ran a small church music site (still online) and before long the site was selling the range of CDs to help out churches with no organist who wanted proper organ accompaniments, rather than mechanical computerised versions.

Here's a screenshot from 2006:

This is a real example of a modern, distributed organisation. John and Wendy are based in Nottingham, while Brian is based in Swindon 130 miles away. The three of them have only been in the same room once - otherwise all business is conducted electronically and through the post.

The CD accompaniments became increasingly popular, so Brian set up a separate site, HymnCDs.com to focus on the accompaniments.

Over the years we've made big changes. There are now 117 CDs in our catalogue, and we sell far more downloads and MP3 sets than CDs. (If you prefer, you can get to the site from HymnDownloads.com or HymnMP3s.com.) But the aim is the same: to produce affordable recordings to help those who can't get an organist sing hymns and worship songs.