Okay, so obviously we're a little behind schedule here. Hence the length of this entry. There's a lot of catching up to do.

The last entry referred to our plans to have band on Tuesday and Thursday the week of the 11th. Instead of doing Tuesday and Thursday, we did no band at all that week. Scheduling conflicts. However, Richard and Jeremy were able to record some of Richard's guitar tracks. In terms of the whole band, this two-night-per-week schedule just plain is not working, and it's just as well we're scrapping it. We haven't been able to pull it off yet anyway.

Last Wednesday was the first band night in nearly two weeks. We de-mic'd the drum kit and set up back in performance configuration, and just sort of jammed. For some reason, our energy was kind of low so we didn't exactly blow the windows out. After a while, Jeremy and Richard debuted the new songs they've been working on. I bet you're pretty interested in how that process works. No? Fine, just pretend then.

Jeremy and Richard are the songwriters in the band. You know how Lennon and McCartney used to sit across from each other with their guitars when they wrote songs? Richard and Jeremy don't do that. They're not songwriting partners. Jeremy pretty much writes his songs, and Richard writes his songs, and they hear each other's songs with the rest of us when they bring them to band practice. There have been a few exceptions. On "Boomtown," for instance, Jeremy wrote the music and Richard wrote the words. The Happy Bouncy Song was entirely collaborative (and thus is the only song in our repertoire which contains any lyrics by me). But for the most part, our songs tend to have one writer each.

What happens then is the writer, either Richard or Jeremy, will play the song for the rest of us (and sing it, if there are words to it yet). After the first run-through (sometimes during), the rest of us will join in. Jeremy/Richard will play the song's basic chord structure while the rest of us work on adding texture with our respective parts. That's why Richard typically sings his own songs and Jeremy sings his. It's also why they often end up playing rhythm guitar on their own songs; it's easier than switching after a lead part has been figured out, plus it's easier to sing while playing rhythm anyway. Meanwhile, Pete and I have almost complete freedom to come up with whatever we want, as long as it fits the song. Again, there are exceptions--for instance, Jeremy wrote the music for "The Optimist" on the bass, so that's what he plays on that song--but that's typically the way it works.

Anyway. Last Wednesday we messed around with a new song of Richard's (which we actually had messed around with a gig or two ago), a jaunty little tune in D major. I think Richard has words for it, but he wasn't singing them, so we could just run through the riff over and over again, becoming familiar with it and experimenting with different stuff on it to see what worked. Jeremy had a couple new songs too. One of them we'd heard before, but I think the words are new. We went through that a couple of times. Then he had another one which does not have words yet but which I like a lot. It goes from A/D to F/B-flat in a way which I find reminiscent of late-sixties Neil Diamond. That's intended as a compliment.

We knocked off early because Richard was expecting company, and I hauled my bass amp over to Jeremy's place so he and I could record some bass tracks there the next night (Thursday). Which we did. Simple setup: my bass was plugged into the amp, with the output plugged into the recorder, and a line from the recorder into Jeremy's tuner, into which the cans I was wearing were plugged. There was no output from the amp speaker, so Jeremy's neighbors never heard a thing. While I played, Jeremy overlaid the output from my amp over the tracks we've already done: Pete's drums, as you'll recall, plus the guitar parts Richard recorded the previous week. I'm here to tell you they sound great so far. Or at least they did until I got my low-frequency fingerprints all over them. The songs in question were the ones we're going to be putting on our demo: "Free," "One More Day," "Boomtown," "Princess in a Jar," "Polaroid," and "Adornments." Richard had played acoustic guitar on a couple of those songs, and those were recorded with a mic on the guitar going to one input, and a detachable pickup going to another input via an amp. The result came out sounding really bright and sharp. I hope Jeremy can mix my part as well. Another really cool thing was that Jeremy had combined two takes of Richard's lead part on "One More Day." I wish I could describe what that sounds like. I guess you'll just have to buy the CD when we finish it.

The actual experience of recording was a little weird. There I was, in his computer room, playing my bass while wearing the one pair of usable headphones in the house (we forgot the other ones at the KrakaTomb). Which means all he could hear was me plinking away on the strings with no amplification whatsoever. Then when I was done he would press "stop." Then we'd unplug the headphones from the tuner and listen to what I'd done to Pete and Richard's work. Like I said, I hope he can mix my tracks well. After a while, he got up and left the room while I played, and he and his wife did stuff around the house to the muted sounds of my plinking. "Princess in a Jar" must have been particularly entertaining to listen to in the other room. That song has this fiendishly hard bass line, a real John Entwistle-inspired finger-scorcher that would have me cursing the name of its composer if that name was not my own. I try not to let it overpower the song, which actually isn't hard because it's a pretty powerful song to start with. So while playing with the headphones on, I can hear the dramatic buildup as the song progresses from ominous to a full-blown, howling storm, my part striving for a balance with the tracks Richard and Pete recorded one week and one month before, respectively. But all Jeremy and his wife heard was several minutes of high-speed plinking. Plink, plink, a-plinkety-plink plink, plinka-plinka-plinka plink.

Here's the other thing about recording: I can't use the band to cover my mistakes. When we're practicing, or even performing live, I can get pretty sloppy and nobody notices. Here, I'm laying down a solo performance on a digital recording medium. It's a considerably less forgiving environment. Also, it's a lot easier to draw energy from three other live musicians making a live racket than from a pair of headphones and two bandmates who aren't even in the house. Being rusty from two weeks without practice didn't help either. We did two takes of everything except maybe "Adornments." If Jeremy wants to redo anything I laid down, I'm not going to argue. At least he showed me where the "stop" button was on the recorder.

Other random items: Jeremy got a CD burner that will work with the recorder. He also had to get a SCSI cable, and some kind of input card, and I think he also needed a hyperblyzic dirndlizer with a modified flimbulating adaptertron in order to allow the recorder's mediasomething-or-other to interface with his computer's polarized grungleplarfer. I don't pretend to understand all the technical stuff. Haven't talked to Rob lately, so I don't know how the gig search is going. His coworker no longer occupies www.krakathoom.com. Instead, you get a blank white page that says "This is the Homepage of Krakathoom". Jeremy approves: "Simple, understated," he says. As for the DAT from the party in April, Pete's peeps in Illinois do not have the gear to transfer it to CD or magnetic tape. However, the host of the party knows a guy who does. That's who has the DAT now. We might actually be able to hear it in the next week or so. The aforementioned host also knows the guy who does the booking at the Uptown, and he's going to get a copy of the party tape as soon as it's finished. Fingers crossed.

Tonight, more jamming in the KrakaTomb, which means I have to schlep my bass amp down those bleeding stairs again. Tomorrow, Richard and I will start recording vocal tracks. Scary.