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.