Funny how it gets hot in the summer. And humid.

Our recording session was punctuated by turning the ceiling fan on and off; three clicks to turn it off while recording, one to turn it on again while waiting for the computer to save a good take.

Thank you, Craig, for installing ceiling fans in your house.

It turns out that last week’s work on Banish Misfortune / Swallowtail yielded usable results, so this week we went back to the O’Keefe’s set and the Dubuque set.

This time we improved the transition from Derrane’s into Trip to Durrow. Going straight from the jig to the reel seemed too abrupt, so what we did at first was have Craig flat pick the last two bars of Derrane’s as an echo, then go into Durrow. It still felt a little abrupt, so we added a bar of rest before coming in on Durrow, and the transition flows much better now.

I think these two sets took the whole evening because they’re both difficult for me and for Jerry; for some reason it’s just harder to play some things accurately and expressively than others. I got hung up especially on Derrane’s and Spootiskerry; Jerry on Durrow. We ended up saving five takes of the one set and I think three of the other, so I have a lot of listening to do today to see if any of them will be good.

We talked a bit about that — my work of evaluating — while waiting for the computer to save these eight takes onto the jump drives (yes, it takes two of them to save eight takes; the takes are roughly 70MB each since we have to save them as “bundle” files).

I’m making some progress — albeit slowly — in adopting a “live feel” standard, understanding that recording whole sets in ensemble is necessarily different from laying down individual tracks and sections of tracks. It’s a tough task for me, since I tend to see trees rather than a forest.