Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

This morning I went to Fed Ex to ship the CD master, another CD with the graphics files, color proofs, and a deposit check to National Tape and Disc.

It’s amazing to me, but not really surprising, how all that stress and overly-focused anxiety has just melted away, and how I’ve regained perspective, remembering that the important thing is that this album show the beauty of the coming of Christ. I slept well last night.

Doing the graphics was a pretty amazing experience. I wish I’d allotted more time to it, especially considering I had no experience with PhotoShop.

The stripped-down program that came with my scanner is also an Adobe product, and I’d just assumed PhotoShop would do all the same things the same way, just with extra features and tools I wouldn’t need to worry about.

Oh no. Very different products, so a lot of my design time was figuring out how to do things.

I learned how to use some of the cool features PhotoShop has that PhotoDeluxe doesn’t, like writing text on a curved path for the CD imprint, adjusting kerning and leading to space text horizontally and vertically the exact way I wanted it in the booklet, using “Curves” to adjust the color of a photo more precisely than I could with other color adjustment tools, and modifying a selection to make it smoother or smaller.

Eric Hause helped me learn my way around, and Christi Sobel helped me with a lot of the scanning and image work.

One particular challenge was that the original artwork, a beautiful collage by my college friend Andrea Seavers, uses a textured paper for Mary’s and Jesus’ skin. That paper didn’t scan well, so Christi used various tools to smooth out the texture and even out the color. I made the final adjustments last night and had color proofs made at Kinko’s, so everything would be ready to ship this morning.

Whew!

I can’t say enough about the folks at Electric Wilburland.

Calm and assured, kind and patient and generous, easygoing and humorous, not to mention highly skilled, Matt and Will have made this project a fantastic experience. Matt’s engineering has been thoughtful, sensitive, attentive both to details and to context; he’s also given helpful feedback and suggestions throughout the process. And both of them have given me confidence when I was too far gone to think anymore.

Thanks, guys; you’re the best.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in my car at 9:00am about to turn on the ignition that I realized how anxious I was about this final day in the studio.

See, it only takes me a half hour to get there, and we start at 10:00. Yeah. I made myself go back in the house and read for thirty minutes, but even so I was still shaking when I got to the studio. Matt suggested a cup of tea (tea! I didn’t even know they had any), and soon I was sipping a lovely herbal brew with chamomile and some other stuff, aptly named Tension Tamer.

Since Thursday’s session, my task had been to listen to the mixes and make sure everything was as I wanted it.

I listened to it all day Friday as I worked on the graphic design, and thought it sounded great — but my attention was almost entirely on the computer and I only heard the CD as background and occasional snatches that grabbed my attention.

Saturday and Sunday I listened more attentively, and came up with a list of places I wanted to double-check. Some were simple mix concerns — wanting various instruments’ or parts’ volumes adjusted here and there. Some were performance concerns — a knock on the bridge or a weak note; perhaps I had a better take we could edit from. Some were editing concerns — I thought I could hear some of the edit points and I worried that they were blatant noises that everyone else would notice, too.

As I listened, though, I reminded myself that I have a tendency to look not just at trees (instead of the forest), but their leaves, even the cells of the leaves, even the little bits floating around in the cells, etc.

So, I decided that today would be “Trust the Engineer” Day. It’s the engineer’s job to make the edits work. If they didn’t work he would have told me so — at the time they were made, so that I could have done another set of takes if necessary. Therefore, as we reviewed each of the things on my list, whenever I was in doubt, I chose whatever Matt suggested.

Someday I hope to be a good enough musician that I won’t need to rely on edits in order to record an album on a reasonable budget. I would love to be able to play both precisely and expressively. Then I wouldn’t be sitting here with a sinking feeling in my stomach, wondering if, by attending too much to precision (in the form of edits), I might have taken the life out of my performance.

Conclusions… obviously I’m still “in the hole,” like I was after recording “He Shall Feed His Flock.” Anxiety is surely making me focus on tiny negatives instead of being able to enjoy any overall beauty. But it’s “Trust the Engineer” Day still, and I’m fairly confident that I’ve done my best and made a good record. So, I take a deep breath, put aside my stomach-sinking fears, and say, “Woo-hoo! It’s done and I love it!”

Today we mixed the four remaining tunes.

Only one presented any challenges: “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus / Planxty Irwin.” This is one where I made some arrangement decisions after recording some of the parts, so the different parts were not entirely aligned with the various tracks. Dealing with that sort of thing wasn’t even really challenging, it was just a matter of finding where a part switched tracks and adjusting the levels accordingly.

We were done by lunchtime.

I’m definitely experiencing some strong symptoms of Wilburland Withdrawal.

Making a recording is a very intense process, and Matt (and Will) are such great guys — patient, kind, and really good at what they do. And I’ve been working at Wilburland for the past four months — it’s the most sustained intense thing I’ve done this year.

Sigh.

I think this is one of the reasons why I don’t think I would enjoy home recording, even though with today’s technology you can get great results and save money. I love being in a studio and working with a good engineer — music is best when it’s shared.

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.

So tired…

Thinking about graphic design, editing and mixing, and whether or not I liked my arrangement of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” kept me up late last night, and then I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. “Above thy deep and dreamless streets…” — in my case dreamless because sleepless! Not the best way to prepare for a week in the studio. However, there is good news… (No, I didn’t switch to Geico.)

…Today we finished recording! Woo-hoo! I added one dulcimer note to “Gesù Bambino” (I’m so glad I only had to tune that one note and a few neighbors). Then I redid one recorder section of the same tune so that the breathing would be the same as if one were singing the words, and I also did the recorder parts for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I decided I liked my arrangement just fine.

Once the recording was done, we started on the mixing. First, we tackled “He Shall Feed His Flock,” after loading the tracks Henry Smith sent from his Outback Studio in Virginia, where Tom Abernethy recorded a guitar part for me. Then we finished editing “Hewlett / Silent Night,” and mixed that and “Easter Thursday / O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” the two Hanshaw Trio medleys. Finally, we worked on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Christmas Star.”

So what is mixing, anyway? I’m not an engineer… but as far as I understand it, mixing is about setting relative volume levels among multiple instruments or parts, panning different parts so they sound like they come from the left, right, or center, adjusting equalizers so things have the proper amounts of high, mid, and low sounds, and adding effects like reverb, which provides a little echo as if one were playing in a cathedral or something.

As a general mixing philosophy, I prefer to leave sounds pretty natural. I’d like to control the sound through performance as much as possible — i.e. playing loudly or quietly, using different kinds of hammers, etc. Sometimes, though, judicious use of equalization or effects can smooth or clarify a sound, or occasionally adjust a performance choice that perhaps wasn’t what I wanted after all.

I especially like to use a little reverb on the recorder, psaltery, and fiddle, because I love the sense of soaring or floating it provides. Matt has also used just a hint of reverb to add a sense of space to the dulcimer.

One of the challenges I face in the mixing process is deciding whether I want a different volume level or an effect or equalization adjustment. It’s partly a communication challenge. If I express dissatisfaction with the character of the sound, Matt expects to deal with it by equalization rather than by volume. He knows that changing the volume doesn’t change the character of the sound.

Sometimes, though, changing the volume changes the way I perceive the sound. For example, when I recorded the first psaltery parts for this album, I thought they sounded too scratchy and wobbly. But when we lowered their volume, I discovered that the sound only bothered me when it was too loud compared to the other parts.

I had to deal with this challenge with the first melody line of “Twinkle” and some of the other things we mixed today. Some of them we adjusted with volume, some with equalization; in the case of “Twinkle,” I ended up asking for a lower volume and an equalization adjustment.

This morning I was thinking about nearing the end of this project. As glad as I am to be almost done, I’ll miss the studio work. I enjoy recording (in spite of the stresses), and I find the engineering part fascinating. It’s cool to watch Matt position mics, splice different takes together, and set up all the mixing adjustments. The board at Wilburland is even automated, so that once we decide what should happen to what tracks and when, we can sit back and listen while the board moves all the sliders and such. That’s just cool.