Today we mixed six more tunes, beginning with “Christ Child Lullaby,” which only needed a few volume adjustments so that the change between recorder and dulcimer sections would not be too drastic.

Then we worked on “Noel Nouvelet / Wexford Carol” and “What Child Is This?” — there were a couple of noises on these two that I wanted to look at, to see if we had better takes of those spots. Once that was taken care of, “Noel” just needed a little volume adjusting of a pair of psaltery parts and a pair of dulcimer parts.

“Three Ships Medley” didn’t present any problems, and I think the only things that concerned me about “The Lord at First Did Adam Make” were a pair of dulcimer parts that I thought were panned too far apart and a recorder section that had too much of a volume jump at one point.

On “Fallen,” there was a timing issue I hadn’t noticed before. It turns out that it was an effect of some processing Matt was doing on the melody track, so all we needed to do was move the whole accompaniment track to match.

Generally, my job now has been to occupy myself while Matt does most of the mixing, so that when it’s done, I can listen with fresh ears. If both of us were listening equally carefully throughout the process, it would be a lot harder to really hear the results… the trees would overwhelm the forest.

So, I started out reading a library book I’d brought. When that got tedious, I read some of another book picked from a pile of reading material in the control room. Then I got tired of reading, and I started to feel a little left out. I wanted to observe all the cool things Matt was doing and find out why and how he did them, but of course that would defeat the purpose of keeping my ears fresh.

Sigh.

Fortunately Will was downstairs mixing recordings from the Newfield Fiddle Festival, and he let me watch and listen.

Tomorrow, four more tunes to mix.