Verge of December

The month of album recording will draw to a close in 15 minutes. Loyal KEIT groupie Carina Armenta tagged along to the final rehearsal tonight and supplied champagne and orange juice, so we wrapped up the month in style with mimosas.

While there is much rejoicing about having reached the finish line, we won't actually cross it until I finish assembling all the tracks into final versions of songs, which I figure I can wrap up by the middle of next week, most likely. I need to create an album cover, too. I'm going to base it on the description in the novel. That's right, the novel I wrote.

Then you can listen to The Aluminum Album.

We are also hoping to have an album release party on December 10. It may not happen, but if it does, you will not want to miss the chance to join the screaming throngs of fans assembled to hear Know Eye Inn Teem live in concert, and mingle with the rock stars in person. So mark your calendar.

Miracle Button

Big, BIIIIIIIIGGGGGG sigh of relief: I just figured out how to fix our 11th-hour technical problem. I was messing around with "You Know I'm No Good," and I realized that depending on which cute icon I pick for each track, I can make it sound different. And here I was just choosing the icons based on how pretty they were! I was especially fond of the red guitar.

Anyway, I used the icon button to make KEIT sound really awesome on that song, and then moved on to "Sunday Bloody Sunday," which had a volume problem from the beginning because we recorded it live so a lot of us were aiming sound waves at the microphone simultaneously. I was scrolling through the icons and settled on one called "Live Performance" (actually just a silhouette of a man's head; not pretty at all), and poof! Volume problem solved.

The implications for my two troubled keyboard tracks were immediately evident. I opened up "Brighter Than Sunshine," clicked the miracle button, and held my breath.

And it worked!!!

I am so excited, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to sleep.

Feeling Faint

Something awful happened tonight when I assumed my usual spot on the couch with the laptop, shoveling leftover turkey, stuffing, and apple pie into my mouth (yes, I'm still reliving Thanksgiving at every meal, and loving it). I pulled up "Brighter Than Sunshine" and began listening to the tracks, and realized that the keyboard track was way, way too quiet. There must have been some sort of wiring issue between the keyboard and the recorder.

I did everything I could think of to fix the problem. I opened up the GarageBand "help" file. I went back to the original .wav file of the track. I made duplicate tracks and played them on top of each other. I experimented with buttons labeled "compressor" and "equalizer." I adjusted volume curves.

Nothing helped; it was still too faint. I tried to rationalize to myself that a song with "brighter" and "sunshine" in the title was just as easy to discard as ones with "happy" in the title, but the thought of tossing aside another song after the band had already done so much work on it was dismaying.

I tried to shrug it off by moving on to "I Just Called To Say I Love You," and horror of horrors, it has the SAME PROBLEM. There are two keyboard tracks: one, recorded on the 15th, is fine; the other, recorded on the 19th, is unusable. Oh it was terrible. Here we are, a mere five days from December, and suddenly two of The Aluminum Album's songs are in jeopardy.

Mic thought he was all done with the album last week. I have, via email, thrown myself at his feet and begged him to re-record those tracks on The Device, which is something of a logistical pain, especially on a tight schedule. If he will do it, I then have to get another violin track and vocal track, even though there was no problem with those tracks, because otherwise the timing won't match up. It pains me. Does Stevie Wonder have to deal with this sort of setback? Does Aqualung? I think not.

Giving Thanks for One More Song in KEIT's Repertoire

My weekend so far is going something like this:

1. Sprawl on couch with laptop, play with GarageBand software.
2. Eat excessive quantities of leftover turkey, stuffing, gravy, apple pie.
3. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.....

Yesterday Brad and Cerin came over to record "Eleanor Rigby." Earlier in the week, some ominous band email traffic had given me low expectations for this rehearsal. The emails contained negativity along the lines of "that's not gonna happen" and "couldn't find anything" (referring to the proper sheet music) and "have we given up hope?"

I sat my string section down with some beer, pie and whipped cream as soon as they arrived, and braced myself for the bad news. Was "Eleanor Rigby" just another pipe dream, destined to be abandoned by KEIT like "Happy Together" (dearth of horn players) and "Happy, The End" (too damn hard)?

No, KEIT rose to the occasion, as we so frequently do -- leaving intact our record of dismissing only songs with "happy" in their title. As a tragic and depressing song, "Eleanor Rigby" sparked our can-do attitudes. In fact, we sailed through the rehearsal with very few problems.

Cerin dragged her parents to this rehearsal, poor dears! They are in town for Thanksgiving. Both are musicians themselves and delightful people. I couldn't convince them to contribute to the album, though. Maybe next year!

One of the fun things about "Eleanor" was that Cerin and Brad recorded two different tracks each on their cello and violin, respectively. This made it sound like they were a quartet. The final version is quite textured in that respect.

I insisted that Cerin record a vocal track, then I also tried one myself after she left, for kicks. My voice is a little deeper than hers, which gives me more of a McCartneyesque sound, but she has the advantage of being on key far more often than me. At the risk of tooting my own horn (band joke! SO funny!!), I really did pretty well with my vocal track, to the point where I can't decide whose version is better. Or less bad, if you prefer. So I kept them both. I will need someone else to decide which version goes on the album. But make no mistake, I will cry myself to sleep for a week if that person chooses Cerin's vocals over mine. Got that, neutral third party? : )

Cerin Dresses The Part

It turns out that Brad was offended that I described his last rehearsal as unnoteworthy, so I hope I have done justice to yesterday's rehearsal.

Hide and Seexophone

I am trying to coax a saxophone solo for "Superfreak" out of loyal KEIT groupie Derrick Brent. Derrick is an actual sax player, self-proclaimed rustiness notwithstanding. Apparently his basement is the sort in which a large brass instrument can somehow get lost, but he is working to track it down. He suggested that if he can't find it, we should cover the solo with that underappreciated and underutilized instrument, the kazoo. He was kidding, I assume, but as a contingency plan I purchased one kazoo for each of the seven KEIT members for 79 cents each off the internet this afternoon.

We have made decent progress over the past two days, but none of it really noteworthy, so I will just let these artistic photos from Sunday's rehearsal speak for themselves.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

You were left on the edge of your seat, I'm sure, at the end of the last blog post, when Know Eye Inn Teem was experiencing technical difficulties that threatened to bring us to our knees. Rest easy, they have been resolved. I was still at a loss when Mic arrived on Thursday to tackle Stevie Wonder, but after a little fuss, we realized that the problem was that there were hidden files on the memory card. Damn the hidden files! When we got rid of them, we could use the recorder again. We are back in business.

We recorded the bass keyboard track on "I Just Called To Say I Love You." It was another one of those semi-painful rehearsals when Mic feels his way through a song while I sit uselessly next to him, hitting START and STOP on the recorder. Sometimes I interject comments, like "that sounds right" or "mmmm, sure," designed to give the misleading impression that I have some idea what he is talking about, which I usually don't. To give you a sense of how tedious this process is, I secretly recorded a portion of the proceedings. Here is a near-verbatim excerpt of Mic thinking out loud:

And then the E, that’s A-C-E, what’s above E, that’s an F and that’s an F sharp [plays notes] so yeah well f**in’ whatever, that’s an F sharp, I’m just going to pretend I don’t see those, that’s an F sharp so it’s [plays notes] this just goes [plays notes] no this goes [plays notes] and then that goes in B [plays notes] and that’s A, E, that’s an [plays notes, hums note, plays notes]. That’s a f**kin’ bastard of a little bit there! But that’s repetitive. So that is an A. So at this stage we’re in B, are we? [sound of pen clicking] So that’s saying, hold on, so that’s A, F, [plays notes] that’s D [plays notes]. That’s just trad-style D-D-A-A then [plays notes]. And that’s A, E [plays notes]. Doesn’t matter if it sounds weird, does it? Okay, so I’m going to try this, I’m just going to try, let me see, no, I need this page as well [sound of pages rustling]. Okay, “I just,” “I just,” “I just…” [plays notes]. F**k it! [plays notes] So it’s two Fs. F**k it, how the f**k am I going to be able to do this? I’ll just have to practice it over and over and over again [plays notes]. So it’s how many, two? And then the end. Okay. Let me just try it one time here. I just need to go [plays notes]. Okay, I need to switch over that E bit. E-E-E, so you see I’m looking at one bit here, [plays notes] hold on it goes [plays notes] I’m almost better off not looking at the notes and just memorizing it, I think, in this case here [plays notes]. What’s the tune? No no no it doesn’t [plays notes]. You see it’s not, that note is held, that’s why he’s changing the timing of it here [plays notes].

Hi, are you still awake? Oh, good. Hang in there. Recording the Aluminum Album does feature its fair share of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (or at least rock-n-roll), but Thursday night was a real sleeper. Still, this background work is critically important to building our album.

The band had Friday off, and the only progress today was me ineptly piecing tracks together on the software. We'll be back in the swing of things tomorrow, however, with "Brighter Than Sunshine."

Every Band Needs A Dictator

The past two rehearsals have not been wildly exciting, but we have added some texture to our Know Eye Inn Teem original song, "6AM." Everyone agrees that this song rocks. I believe it will be our legacy. It would be the one that we would market as a single and it would go to the top of the charts, if there were a market and charts for songs by makeshift bands recording an album in someone's basement in a 30-day period without the benefit of a full set of real instruments.

If such a market existed, we'd have it cornered right now.

Rachel began work on the vocals on Monday but we did not get a final track that night, even after I brutally forced her to record it over and over and over again to try to get it perfect. Sometimes, as the album's producer, I have to crack the whip a little. Cerin bitterly accused me on Saturday of treating her like "my little guitar monkey," or some such thing, which is silly, because she IS my little guitar monkey, and why can't she just embrace it? It will be interesting to see how many of my band members volunteer for this again next year.

Last night we did finalize the vocals, with Rachel and Julie (shining at her first rehearsal) collaborating. They got one track that was great before the trombone solo, and one that was great after the trombone solo, so I intend to cut and paste the good parts into the final product. Peter demonstrated his uncanny ability to spontaneously add trombone noises to a song to make it sound better.

Unfortunately, before we could have Julie add some triangle-n-tambourine action, the recorder's memory card filled up. I tried dumping some material I'd already uploaded to GarageBand, but this did not solve the problem. This could be a major issue if I can't figure it out before Mic shows up tonight to do the keyboard part on "I Just Called To Say I Love You." Stay tuned.

The Fun Returns to The Aluminum Album

This past weekend was a very productive and energizing one for Know Eye Inn Teem.

I had written some lyrics for an original KEIT song called "6AM," but had not finalized a melody. I keep a little digital recorder by my bed because sometimes as I am on the verge of sleep, tunes will come to me and I will hum them into the recorder or lose them forever. Unfortunately, the "6AM" tune fell victim to the "lost forever" phenomenon, so when Cerin arrived on Saturday, she was horrified to learn that her task was to help me make some words on a piece of paper into a real song, without much idea what it was supposed to sound like. Apparently my directions, along the lines of "it needs to sound angry," were not much to go on.

Indulge me as I take a tangent and wax philosophical for a moment. One of the best things about writing a novel in a one-month period, as I have done three times, is that you find yourself thinking in entirely new ways. You look at things differently, and interpret them differently. You surprise yourself with these new thought patterns. It is exhilerating.

The same is true for someone recording an album with no musical experience. Music has started to sound different to me than it did just a couple weeks ago. I appreciate things about songs that I didn't notice before. I have been learning how to approach a song to try to make it sound musical, which is a welcome challenge.

All this translates to Saturday being really exciting for me. Cerin played chords and from nothing, we teased out what "6AM" should sound like. It was not easy. For example, part-way through the process I was certain that Cerin had started playing a different chord during the chorus, and I liked the original chord better, but I couldn't remember what it sounded like, and Cerin insisted she was playing it exactly the same, and I couldn't find the spot in the recording to prove that I was right (probably because I was wrong, I admit, but we will never definitively know; isn't that convenient for me?). Also there were some problems with my lyrics having too many syllables in places. Also I can't carry a tune, so it was hard for me to articulate a melody, while being even harder for Cerin to make up chords and sing along at the same time.

Also, Cerin was not wild about my verse about the penguin. Some people just do not appreciate a good penguin reference in a song about getting up in the morning.

Amazingly, though, the end product was the outline of a real song! I can't get over this. We wrote a song. And it is awesome, if you ask me. Both Cerin and I have found it running through our heads afterwards. It is the kind of song, we decided, that you could imagine some annoying person singing out loud on the metro.

We have a guitar track, and over the next few days we will be adding percussion, vocals, and trombone. I cannot wait to hear the finished product.

Still riding on this high, KEIT tackled "Sunday Bloody Sunday" yesterday. This was a kick. We decided to record it live, rather than with separate tracks for each musician. This meant we all had to play together, which is really fun. The original attempts were laughable, which was reflected in the first few recordings, which contain a lot of laughing. Peter and I, doing vocals, had some struggles with timing, and Cerin and Mic had issues with an E-flat in the middle. No one could figure out when the song was supposed to end.

Worst of all, there were major problems with the drumming, which we were doing via keyboard. We couldn't hear the drumming well enough to stay with the beat, and we couldn't turn it up because then it overwhelmed the song. We tried a couple of fixes unsuccessfully, and then finally decided to scrap the keyboard drumming and revert to our old standby, Jennie Banging On A Pan Lid, and miraculously, it all came together without the drumming - all of a sudden, everyone was playing and singing the way we were supposed to. I should mention here that Brad made his KEIT debut on violin for this song, and he was fantastic - as Mic's girlfriend Summer put it when we forced her to listen to it afterward, the violin really makes the song sound Irish.

What was especially fun about the "Sunday Bloody Sunday" effort was that we got immediate gratification because there are no tracks to mix with a live recording, so when we finished rehearsal, the song was done, and we could listen to it and pat ourselves on the back. It is the first finished song for The Aluminum Album. The Teem is very proud.

Highs and Lows, and I'm Not Talking Musical Notes

Band rehearsals can be pretty fun. When we played "Superfreak" a couple days ago, we got ourselves in the right frame of mind by pulling up the 1981 Rick James video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75qXUfp4wtw). Mic innocently professed he had no idea the song was about prostitutes when he selected it for KEIT to play. We were not fooled.

We had Chinese food delivered (if the rock-n-roll lifestyle is about subsisting on delivered pizza and moo shu pork, I will be a Grammy contender by the end of this month) and then Mic warmed up in the studio on "the device" and Peter, Rachel and I ran through the vocals upstairs. It quickly became apparent that I should have chosen more songs that feature, as "Superfreak" does, 1) back-up singers, and 2) lyrics like "yeow" and "blow, daddy!" Interestingly, I should have known this from my novel, when I had my characters choose songs based on the fact that the lyrics contained whooping and shouting.

It was just plain fun. We married it all together for a few live -- and lively -- run-throughs, then sequentially recorded keyboard (including a drum beat), vocals, and back-up vocals. It did take longer than expected. We were supposed to wrap up by 10:00; it was 10:45 by the time we finished. I'm sure my neighbors were delighted.

Unfortunately, that's when the fun kind of dwindled a little. I was supposed to play with the software the next night, but I was in a gloomy mood, so I let it go. Then last night Mic was the only band member available, and he and I spent lonely hours trying to pick out the piano notes and chords in "Happy, The End" because we couldn't get the sheet music. We only got about half-way through, but KEIT was supposed to have finished that song. I am not sure how the grueling schedule is going to accomodate spending more time on it to whip it into shape. Sigh.

So the latest lessons learned about one-month album recording are that you should pick songs with sheet music, back-up singers, and super-freaky lyrics, and it is important for band morale to get as many band members as possible together simultaneously for some jam sessions, even if you are recording their pieces separately.

Incidentally, I should mention the band dress code, as the pictures of Peter and Rachel sharing a set of headphones might raise some questions on that point (and other points, but I digress...). Band members are encouraged to dress like Beyonce or Snoop Dogg to the greatest extent possible, but business suits and pajamas are also acceptable. At least Peter took off his tie.

The First Inklings of Actual Music

With two rehearsals under our belt, my prediction is that The Aluminum Album will consist of songs that sound mostly mediocre, yet recognizable. What I mean is that when we are playing "Superfreak," you will know it is "Superfreak," but you might not want to listen to it all the way through. We are okay with that.

And speaking of "Superfreak," we had to adjust the discography a little bit. It happens that we couldn't get sheet music for "Home Grown," so we have cast our lot with Rick James instead. "Happy Together" may also go by the wayside because I chose it for its brass instruments, but our trombone player will be giving a no doubt fascinating presentation about urban planning or something on the day we were supposed to rehearse it.

On the other hand, we are creatively getting around some of these hurdles. I thought we were set for "Happy, The End," but it turns out that what I identified as guitar noises were actually bass noises, and furthermore it turns out that a guitar is not the same thing as a bass, and on top of that an electric guitar (or bass) does not make the sustained noises I had in mind without some kind of additional electronic contraption. Who knew? But not to worry - Peter set us up on the software with a sound called something like "Shimmery Dream Guitar Reverb" (or was it "Dreamy Shimmer Guitar Reverb"?) and it sounds kind of good. "Good," of course, being a relative term.

The software, GarageBand, is awesome. So far I could not be more inept at using it, but it is the key to our album. I can't wait to figure out how to get it to do our drumming so that we can be spared the agony of me beating arhythmically on a pan lid with a wooden spoon.

Loyal groupie Brian Levy generously lent KEIT a microphone and recording device that are proving very impressive. In fact the mike is almost too good: it picked up that we were recording while listening to the actual songs on headphones, so you can hear us playing "You Know I'm No Good" and Amy Winehouse singing it oh-so-faintly in the background. Oops!

Tonight's rehearsal will be Mic's debut, on keyboard (known to KEIT members, reverently, as "the device"). "Superfreak" is the song. We're superfreakin' now.

Knee-Deep in the Rock-n-Roll Lifestyle

Last night I partied like a rock star with an actual rock star, namely Bono. Okay, well it wasn’t just me and Bono. Queen Noor, George Soros, and Ashley Judd were there too. Okay, and several hundred other people. Anyway he was very excited to hear from me that Know Eye Inn Teem will be covering "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on our album, and wholly endorsed our plan to set it to a mambo beat, wondering aloud in his charming Irish accent why he hadn't thought of it himself.


I was drinking, so the details of that story may not be entirely accurate.

Bono and me

I got to bed around 3AM, and then woke up about 7:30 this morning to have time to run to my office to retrieve my new (used) iBook before my sound technician would arrive at the KEIT studio at 10AM. By "sound technician," I actually mean "raccoon exterminator" (as many of you know, I have raccoons). Unfortunately, he never showed up, which was particularly aggravating because before I became a rock star (i.e. yesterday), I was used to getting a lot more sleep.


I did squeeze in a 30-minute nap before the very first KEIT rehearsal, then powered up the iBook for the very first time right before Peter and Cerin arrived. I will confess to you that at that moment -- hung over, sleep-deprived, staring uncomprehendingly at GarageBand software I had never seen before on an unfamiliar computer -- I had some serious self-doubts.


But we ordered a pizza and dove in. We played "You Know I'm No Good," and you know, we were no good, at least at first. But we got the hang of it, and Peter figured out how to layer the instruments and vocals on the software. So after we played it through a few times together, we finished the rehearsal by each listening with headphones to Amy Winehouse singing the song, and recording it as we played or sang along individually. Now I just have to figure out how to put the layers together.

Today's rehearsal was miraculous, in short. I am very proud of the Teem.