Carmel Magazine

Carmel Magazine, Winter-Spring 2019

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The Multi-Talented Michael Lent B Y M I C H A E L C H AT F I E L D 188 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 A mong Monterey Peninsula musicians, there is an elite group of players for whom only first names are necessary. For instance, when musicians are discussing guitarists, they need only say "Mike," and everyone knows they're talking about Mike Lent. A Pacific Grove native, Lent has been a professional musician since the age of 15. He attended the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston and has lent his instrumental and composition talents to a plethora of film and television soundtracks. Since 1997, Lent has held the high-profile gui- tar chair in singer/songwriter Barry Manilow's band, a job that has taken him around the world. Aside from his obvious prowess as a six-string slinger, Mike Lent has developed a parallel career as a music producer. "I started producing in my early 20s with bands I was in," he says. A few years later, Lent made the pilgrimage to the then-center of the music universe, Los Angeles, and soon found himself busy producing and performing on soundtracks. "In the '90s I was touring with (R&B singer) Jeffrey Osborne but also spending a lot of time in LA doing session work," he says. "I was around a lot of young musicians and producers like myself and we came to the real- ization that we had to do a lot of different things to stay busy as a musi- cian, composer, producer." That meant getting up to speed on the emerg- ing digital recording technologies. Trading the Guitar for a Producer's Chair Guitarist Mike Lent has decades of experience in professional recording studios. He focused his music production expertise on singer/songwriter Linda Arceo's 2018 CD "Just Believe." More than a dozen top-tier musicians performed on the recording. Photo: Kelli Uldall

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