The best thing about recording with headphones on is that you have twice as many wires hanging from your person as you do when you're just jamming. And when I say "best," I really mean "suckiest." Oh, well. Wireless headphones aren't in our budget right now, and even if they were I don't think I'd be all that excited about spending a couple hundred bucks for the privilege of being clumsy. For some reason, we all have the idea that since we're recording, we should be playing sitting down. That's really only true of Jeremy, since he's the one running the recorder, and Pete, since he's the one running the drums. But Richard and I also sit on these low footstool-type thingies while we're recording. Last night I tried to adjust the one I was sitting on, because one of its feet was on my headphone cable. I went to stand up, holding my bass in my hand, not realizing the loose end of my strap was under my foot. That caused the neck of my bass to lever up and bash me right in the mush. I sat down again in a hurry, made sure I still had all my teeth, and said not a word to the guys. Dude, that hurt.

Despite my Gilligan-like grace, we did manage to get the drum tracks recorded on six songs: "Spank-Ray," "Martyrs & Devils," "Free" (both regular and in "power ballad" mode), "Badlands & Montana Sky," "Time Machine," and "Boomtown." We did at least two takes on each of them. Pete missed a beat on one take of "Martyrs" (I think), and he felt kind of embarrassed about what he called a "major screwup" until we realized how much our definition of a "major screwup" has changed in the past couple of years. For something to be considered a "major screwup" by our musical standards in 1999, it would have had to involve an involuntary key change, the song grinding to a halt, destruction of a piece of equipment, and possibly the death of a band member. We've come so far.

Seriously, another indicator of our progress is that unless we made a conscious effort to change the tempo of a song between takes, the length of the takes always came out to with a second or two of each other. That's without any electronic or mechanical assistance in keeping the beat whatsoever. Krakathoom is a machine.

So, if you've done the math, you'll realize that we have the drum tracks on ten songs recorded. That's enough for a CD, but there's still some good original songs we haven't done. We haven't talked about it, but I imagine we'll want to finish with the drums before we change the recording setup all around. We'll probably do that tomorrow night. It's possible that we'll run out of songs before we run out of time, in which case we'll be able to move on to guitar and bass tracks. At some point, we'll have to find a way to get the music out of Jeremy's hard drive and onto some portable media, but we'll worry about that later.

On the marketing front, Richard tells us that Rob has reported some success in pre-pre-preliminary scouting. We're not booked anywhere yet, but it sounds like Rob is getting a feel for how to go about it. Yay, Rob. Also, we have a DAT tape that somebody recorded at a party we played in April. None of us has access to a DAT deck, but Pete's going to bring the tape down to Illinois in a couple of weeks when he goes down there for school, in hopes that somebody at his school's tech office will be able to translate the DAT to a CD or other format. Not only that, but Pete's school program is distance learning, which means that he and people all over the country attend their classes via the Internet (that's how my wife got her Master's Degree). Between classes, the school webcasts music from unsigned bands. See where this is going? We could be about to go national. More on that after Pete returns.