There were supposed to be two journal entries between this one and the last one, but there were also supposed to be two practices during that time, and that didn't happen. Last Thursday (May 31) got cancelled, and so did Tuesday (June 5), but we were back at it last night. Pete was bleeding from his hands within twenty minutes.

Anyway, we finished recording the drum tracks on all the originals we intend to record. We got "Streets of Water" and "Desert" first. Those songs are a bitch, tempo-wise. "Desert" has different beats for the verses, choruses, and bridge, so it's a pain to keep a steady tempo on that. "Streets of Water" doesn't have drums at all on the verses, so when we record the other instruments we're going to have a big hole to deal with. I suspect we'll end up leaving at least one instrument track up when we do that, so we don't get to the chorus two or three beats before the recorded drum track does. Those two took us a while to get right. There's a reason we didn't start with them. Then we did "The Optimist," "Regret" (also known as "Anus '94" for reasons too immature to go into here), "Little Girl," and "My Baby's Coming Home." The last two were pretty much throwaways, since it was getting kind of late. I think we only did one take each for them. That brings us to a total of sixteen songs. Plus we might do a "live" recording of the "Happy Bouncy Song" and "The Folly (Dr. Moreau)" at some point. The thing about those songs is that they're both extended jams that are different every time, so any attempt to record them one track at a time would be doomed to miserable, ignominious failure. Will all of these songs make it onto the CD? Doubtful, unless we make it a double.

We made one small change to our setup last night. We have five microphones in the house (I think only three of them are ours), but until last night we only had four microphone cables. Richard remedied the cable situation, so we were able to have a mic for vocals. We still have only three microphone stands, however, and all of them were in use on the drums. So Jeremy duct-taped one to the fork of a guitar stand and used that. This arrangement worked fine, since we were sitting down anyway (see previous entry). It was kind of like the old days in Richard's living room in the old apartment, except we didn't even have duct tape then. Jeremy sang quietly, facing away from Pete, so the vocals wouldn't bleed into the drum track. It helped us keep track of where we were, especially in "Desert."

So, next Tuesday we'll be going back to standard rocking mode, then on Thursday we'll start recording the other tracks. We should probably decide which songs will go on our "demo" CD before we start that so we can get them done first and get the demo to Rob ASAP. Also, Jeremy's new CD burner is on the way. Apparently the standard, garden-variety computer CD burner doesn't work for translating music from the recorder's hard drive to CD and Jeremy needed some sort of special equipment. He and Richard discussed the technical issues last night while I sat there drooling gormlessly. Good thing they know what they're doing.

Speaking of Rob, last week he sent us a pretty comprehensive list of places in the area that have live music. Some of them I can't even imagine playing at, but we should probably all go through them together and figure out which ones to have Rob target. Next week maybe. Also next week, Richard is hoping to have the www.krakathoom.com web site up and running. Obviously, it's up while you're reading this. But as of this writing, the URL is occupied by the home page of one of Rob's employees (he's volunteering one of his servers to host the page). What we ought to do is get a hold of www.suck.com, since they're going on hiatus. Not likely, though. At least not for 35 bucks.