By The Way....

Side note: have you ever gone to the top of my page and clicked on "next blog"? Other people's blogs mostly fall into one of three categories, I have found:

1. Blogs in other languages
2. Blogs by Jesus freaks
3. Blogs about people's offspring

No one else blogs about recording an album in a month in their basement, can you believe that? It's like I'm all alone out there in the blogosphere: an English-speaking childless atheist with a makeshift rock band. You'd think we'd be a dime a dozen, but you'd be wrong.

Time To Face The Music

Loyal KEIT groupies deserve an apology: I have not been delivering as a record producer this year, and I am sorry. It has been a rough month personally, and my response has been to drink too much, eat too much, and watch a lot of "House" reruns. I have neglected the tracks; I have neglected my GarageBand studies; I have neglected the blog. I have utterly failed to rally in the face of adversity.

I will say this: I have kept the band well-fed and -watered. It is possible that this is the only reason they have continued to show up. I make wicked good brownies.

I wish I could predict that the last four days of the month are going to feature a redeeming spurt of activity, but USA Network is running a "House" marathon tomorrow, and there's turkey to be eaten. Let's not hold our breath for my comeback.

I don't want my own appalling shortcomings to diminish what the rest of the Teem has done this month, and I also don't want to give the impression that we have not had fun. On the contrary, the Teem has exhibited a brilliant combination of talent and humor. Rehearsals have been a real bright spot in the sometimes gloomy past few weeks. The band has lifted me up.

Ann works hard. Ann plays hard. When necessary, Ann plays hard in her work clothes.

Other times, Ann plausibly passes for a rock star, although maybe not a drummer.

We are having one final rehearsal on Sunday, the 30th. We have some serious problems to fix with "All Mine" and possibly "Qualifiers." It's not worth going into details. They are problems, people, and we're going to fix them. And then we are going to cathartically rock out during whatever hours or minutes remain before the month runs out. And then we are going to go back to our regularly scheduled, other-eleven-months-of-the-year lives, and at least one of us won't be sorry to say goodbye to November, but she will be really happy that she spent part of it making crappy music with some truly extraordinary people.

Chris finally showed up with his electronic drum set! I think it looks like a Stairmaster.

Fueled By Coors Light

Tonight I was supposed to listen to some of the recordings and, you know, work some Garageband mojo on them, but instead I am watching a House rerun and updating the blog and drinking Coors Light out of a can. It would seem that procrastination is just one of my problems.

I did my part for the band today, though--I picked up 100 blank CDs, and a bottle of Coke Zero for Ann.

On Saturday, things got off to a shaky start. Mic showed up at noon, not realizing rehearsal was scheduled for 3:00. He pondered just lurking around the KEIT studio for three hours and rehearsing until everyone else showed up, or poking around Home Depot, where a homeowner like Mic or me could easily pass three hours like they were mere moments, or doing some grocery shopping at Giant, where a person could find himself still in the checkout line three hours later. That is why we call it Giant Line.

I could see that he was yearning to go home and install a range hood, however, so I let him off the hook, but not before he showed me how to do the drums on his keyboard. Now why do I need to learn keyboard drums, when Know Eye Inn Teem has a drummer this year? Because we still have yet to see Chris show up at a rehearsal, that's why. In his defense, he has been working in Kenya, then India, where he got an antibiotic-resistant eye infection in both eyes and puffed up like the Elephant Man. But still. We need our drummer, that is the bottom line.

So my remaining non-range-hood-installing, non-infected band members that day were Ann, Jonathan, and Cerin. We worked on "Show Me The Way." Mic had already recorded what we thought would be the "bass" track on The Device, but Ann had volunteered to play an actual bass track, so we're scrapping the keyboard version. 

Ann and Cerin were all business. They wanted to run through the song over and over until they perfected it. Ann's hand even cramped up.

Jonathan was preoccupied with our recording. He has brought in a super-duper microphone that really looks like a microphone, which is sort of mouthwatering to someone who enjoys having the trappings of a band, even if we sound like poop. However, the microphone proved too good for us: unless we are recording one voice or one instrument at a time, the sound is just muddy no matter whether we use the super-duper realistic microphone or just the recording device or the built-in iBook mike (which is not bad, surprisingly).

I don't mean to imply our recording device, kindly lent by Ann, is not sexy. It looks like a Taser. It's got street smarts. But I digress.

This year, I don't have the patience to record all our songs track by track. Instead, it's quicker and more fun when we're all making noise together, and frankly it didn't sound all that hot even when we did it painstakingly last year. Of course, it didn't help that we sucked last year. I will know more about whether we suck this year when I eventually put down my Coors Light can and actually get around to listening to our recordings. But again, I digress.

I am afraid Jonathan was deflated when I declared I really didn't care what the recordings sound like. I appreciate that Jonathan wants KEIT to be all that we can be. But we need to maintain our sanity and kick up our heels a bit, too.

We recorded many versions of just bass and guitar, none of which were entirely perfect. However, since we were using foolproof keyboard drumming, the timing will match up if I cut and paste the good sections of the various recordings. The keyboard drumming is not ideal; it's a little blah. It sounds quite real on The Device, and I like the fact that The Device can't get an eye infection, but I don't have the wherewithal to vary the drum sounds in the middle of the song. It was fun to play with the keyboard sounds like thunder or a galloping horse or a plane taking off or the apocalypse, but I refrained from including those in "Show Me The Way," which is going to sound plenty weird already when I include the pseudo-voicebox part.

Then we recorded Jonathan singing back-up vocals. Chelsea chose this song for the band, so she's going to sing the main vocal part. The back-up vocals will harmonize with the chorus. Harmony is a new concept for KEIT this year. How far we have come!

Aside from my really key role turning the drumming on and off with the press of a button each time we played the song, I also made a valuable contribution on Saturday by lip-synching the song during the bass and guitar recording, so Cerin and Ann could read my lips for visual clues as to their place in the song. I am not making this up. 

Tomorrow we are going to finalize Ann's song.

A Fly On The Studio Wall

I am sitting right this moment in the Know Eye Inn Teem studio, commenting on a rehearsal in progress so that you don't miss a thing. It's like you're right here with us, going to town on the egg shakers and washboard. What a treat for us all.

Hold on a moment, I've been called upon to give a count-in. This is illustrative of my key role during rehearsals.

We are working on Jonathan's song, abstractly named "Qualifiers." There has been some confusion over diminished guitar chords, but I think Cerin has made sense of it. It is just me, Jonathan, and Cerin tonight.

Jonathan offers for Cerin to make any changes to his chords that she sees necessary, and Cerin retorts that she is merely the tool to make his vision a reality. He instructs her to speed up, and she adopts a pained expression, and makes a sarcastic remark about not being able to psychically divine what he has in mind. Jonathan acknowledges making a mistake: the song should be in cut time, not whole time. 

Jonathan expresses concern that he will come out looking like a jerk in the blog entry, but of course, that's all up to him.

The chorus is a puzzle. There's a bridge, with all the chords that really drive Cerin crazy, then four bars of E-flat, then some other stuff.

Cerin has been instructed to stop playing for four bars of the song, after a B-flat. Well, it might be seven bars, Jonathan thinks. Yes, he's pretty sure. He will give her eye contact to come back in. No, it will be eight bars. Then verse, verse, chorus again.

Cerin fears she has copied down the wrong diminished chord. Yes, she has. It is "wrongness personified." No, Jonathan argues: it sounds good. "You don't get the bass note on the A chord because it's not in the chord," Cerin tells him. But he likes it when she plays the chord's top four strings.

High F, low F, Jonathan doesn't care: whatever's easier.

They are giving the first verse a whirl. It sounds better than I expected, frankly. I like the guitar part; it's smart. There is a debate over what the strumming should sound like, and some expressed bitterness from Cerin that we are playing in cut time. Whatever that means.

Jonathan has thanked Cerin for putting up with him, but she cautioned that we are only halfway through the song, and she may yet be compelled to kill him, especially when we get to those diminished chords.

I have just made a vastly intelligent contribution to tonight's effort by observing that the faster we play this song, the shorter it will be.

We just had a discussion about why I like those vexing minor chords so much. I was offered a totally incomprehensible explanation based on music theory.

We are all happy on Mic's behalf that there's not a keyboard part on this song, because he learns things by ear rather than by reading music, Cerin said, and according to Cerin, Jonathan has arranged the song eccentrically, with some things that repeat within other repeating things, which would stymie someone trying to learn it quickly by ear.

Jonathan has called for what I feel is a horribly, horribly wrong chord in the chorus. I have stated my firm opposition, verging on loathing, to this A-diminished chord. He and Cerin are trying out other options. They have arrived at one that meets with my approval, an A-minor chord.

Cerin is bitching about Jonathan's changes. Now SHE'S worried she's going to sound like a jerk to all this blog's countless devoted readers.

My second bottle of beer is disturbingly empty. I get another one.

Cerin is dismayed to learn that the song does not end when she thought it does: instead of four verses, it has five, plus two bridges. Cerin: "I had no idea what I was getting myself into." She warns that it is starting to sound "dirge-like." We speed it up again. 

Cerin is now pursing her lips, refusing to play faster at my command, and asserting once again, pointlessly, that she is "not my guitar monkey." You know, if it makes her feel better to think that, I'm cool with it.

Cerin says there are so many repetitions that she forgets where she is in the song. A moment is taken while Jonathan ponders what elements of the song he can cut, and laments the idea of axing a line he likes. But he grits his teeth and crosses out a verse and a chorus, mercifully. Cerin acknowledges, with some trepidation, that now when she loses her place, it will be her own fault.

They sing/play again, and Cerin argues for more cuts. Radical cuts! Jonathan resists. Cerin argues that with extra notes playing in spots where Jonathan isn't singing, the song is actually twice as long as a song with five verses. Jonathan agrees to try the song with some additional, Cerin-imposed cuts. "It's going to be hard for me," he says. Cerin generously offers to give Jonathan two measures back per chorus, but she has still managed to cut a whoppin' 24 measures from the dirge as a whole.

We're going to try to record a guitar track. Jonathan and Cerin are negotiating hand signals to cue her chord changes. Eight of the cut bars are reinserted, to Cerin's and my dismay. I play with the egg shaker. 

Breakthrough: two entire verses and their accompanying choruses are cut. Cerin insists that this cut gives the song a new and elegant symmetry. The play/sing it again; we still haven't recorded a thing. It has ended, and the ending is rousing. I approve. The cut breathed life into the song.

We have just made a solid recording of the guitar and solid recording of  the voice. We are pleased. Jonathan was surprised that his voice has so much vibrato.

He comments that it might sound good if we "run it through a filter" and give it a "low-fi sound." Cerin and I cynically remark that it could not possibly sound more low-fi than it already does, but Jonathan explains it might sound good with a crackly 40s-record-style sound, and I have to agree. Might give that a whirl.

Meanwhile, another rehearsal has drawn to a close. Tomorrow is another KEIT day.

The Teem Swings Into High Gear

Know Eye Inn Teem got its act together this weekend, and made two final or near-final live recordings.

On Saturday, we attacked The Magnetic Fields' "Washington DC." Ann had suggested this song for the KEIT repertoire, which is ironic, because it is our only song that doesn't need a bass guitar, which Ann plays. I am going to make Ann put a bass line in anyway, but absent that, the song is done. It is less than 2 minutes long, with some cheerleaderesque chanting and a simple yet endearing melody. In short, it plays to our strengths, plus we love that it is about Washington.

The song has only a couple manic spurts of marching-band-style drumming. Given that our drummer won't return from far-flung parts of the globe until the 15th, I did the drumming. The fuzziness of the recording and brevity of the drumming is such that you can scarcely tell I can't keep the beat. The biggest challenge was to play quietly enough to avoid overwhelming the other band members. At one point they tried to force me to play the drums from the laundry room, but I would have none of it. How undignified would a drummer have to be to play from the laundry room? Please. I have my pride, even if I don't have rhythm.

We got a fairly good recording pretty early in the rehearsal, and then spent I don't even know how long trying futilely to improve upon it. Mic noticed that as time went by, our cheerleaderesque chanting grew ever less perky. Finally we threw in the towel and decided to stick with our original winner of a recording.

Yesterday we took Brad's song, "Iron Kiss," and cooked it from scratch into a bad-ass anthem to love as a dictatorship. Or something like that. I had thought it was a song about Sarah Palin, but apparently I was wrong. In any case, it is a gritty song and I like it. I thought we were going to have to add drums to it on a later date, but when I was upstairs making dinner for the band, Brad sat down at the drums and somehow morphed into a reasonable facsimile of a drummer (Brad is our violinist). This is what I love about Know Eye Inn Teem: I am continually taken pleasantly by surprise.

So we wrapped up "Iron Kiss" yesterday in one day, and even had enough time to goof around afterward, which is how I ended up on Cerin's guitar....

...and Ann's bass. You are fortunate that this blog does not convey the sounds I was making.

Given my crisis of faith last week, I really needed these two wins this weekend. It feels like such a relief to have two songs now more or less in the bag. Jonathan has this bee in his bonnet about getting a "better quality recording," but it's just not a priority for me. I just want to make sure that by November 30, one way or another, we'll have our seven dubious megahits on a disc and we can get trashed and hit the town like proper rockstars during the holiday season, fighting off groupies and paparazzi, lighting off firecrackers out of the sunroof of our moving limo, and engaging publicly in lewd acts under clumps of mistletoe. Like last year.

Our success last weekend really took Ann by surprise.

Not Just A Rock Band: A Barack Band

The band took Tuesday night off to learn that at long, long last, we were not going to wake up the morning after a presidential election and wish we could just die. No, I am ecstatic that we have entered a new era, one filled with rainbows and puppies and other overwhelmingly happy phenomena. To illustrate the sweetness of victory, I baked blue Democratic cupcakes and frosted them with blue Democratic frosting. They were darned tasty.

You kind of assume that nothing will ever be lackluster again in the rainbow-and-puppydog era, but I have to confess that my faith in my insane band project has been foundering. Was it

 ludicrous to take this on? What have I gotten us all into?

The other members of the band cannot be held responsible for my doubts. A lot of it probably has nothing to do with the album at all. Everyone's life is complicated, right? I got back from a trip to India ten days ago and haven't fully unpacked. The election gave me piles of things to do at work. I have raccoons in my attic. I don't seem to own enough pairs of pants, and I don't seem to have time to shop for pants. I am preoccupied with family issues. RCN is switching to digital programming and I won't get any channels anymore. A guy I had a stupid crush on a decade ago appeared on MSNBC wearing a wedding ring. My Smartrip card spontaneously ceased working. I worry about money. 

So, let's not blame the album for my fretting about the album; there's got to be some transference going on here. But still, there are things that really ARE about the album that are gnawing at me. We're a week in, and we've got almost no tracks laid down to show for it. We spent an evening on Lucky's song, and I don't even know what it sounds like yet. Our drummer has been jetting around from continent to continent and won't be available for a rehearsal until the 15th. I haven't gotten past reading Chapter One in my illuminating book on GarageBand software. The thought of Chinese food, a rehearsal staple, is already starting to make me feel nauseous.

Really, I am happy that Bill has found fame and a successful career and a wife. Oh yeah. He deserves it. 

Cerin, who is my rock in addition to being a rockstar, reminded me that there are some real things to feel good about with respect to KEIT's work so far this month. Annimal's song, for example, is a seriously fun little number. People kept telling me "All Mine" would be hard, but Cerin has it down cold, and Mic called his part "a piece of piss," which translates from Irish to "it's easy" in English. We now know what MIDI is and we're not afraid to use it. We borrowed an amp from loyal KEIT groupie Chris Oropeza and it makes the guitar sound like an actual rock band guitar, which is so fantastic. It's too early to freak out and give up, Cerin said.

And probably I had these sort of doubts last year, early in the month. Probably I could just scroll down in this blog and be reassured that any doubts are normal and will fade away.

Whatever about Bill and his wife and his national television audience. I mean, I have a band, you know. Does Bill have a band? Oh please. I think not.

Tomorrow we'll be playing "Washington DC" with a huge cast, by our standards. There's going to be like five of us. I think we can do a live recording and the only thing we'll be missing is the bass, which we can layer on later.

Anyway, just because he's married doesn't mean he's happily married, not that I wish him anything but perfect wedded bliss, of course.

Show Me The Way...Please

Yesterday the band began work on Peter Frampton's "Show Me The Way."

A couple of things stand out about this song. The first and most obvious is the "talk box," which makes a sound that is like a cross between a voice and a guitar. It is sort of a hokey sound. You also hear it at the beginning of Bon Jovi's "Living On A Prayer," prompting one band member to suggest that we play that song next year.

But the band budget does not accomodate the purchase of a talk box, so what is the KEIT solution? Do you really need to ask? It is the kazoo. I have already memorized two of the three talk box interludes in "Show Me The Way," and the third one will be improvised as only a true kazoo artist can do. A challenge of making the kazoo substitution, though, is that it is hard to play the song all the way through without Mic, our keyboardist, collapsing in laughter and losing his place.

Another thing that stands out about the song is that some of the drumming in the Frampton recording sounds eerily reminiscent of the noise made when I banged on a pan lid for the percussion part of last year's "Sunday Bloody Sunday." It's sort of ironic, given the value we placed on finding an actual drummer this year.

This picture nicely sums up a typical day in the KEIT studio: musicians, an iBook, a tambourine, a ukelele, and a plate of biscuits.

We recorded the bass track, but it gave Mic a lot of problems. We couldn't decide on the right sound, and some of the chords were bedeviling. There was also an issue of a certain set of notes that Mic referred to as "onesies" (in contrast with another set referred to as "bastards") showing up randomly in the song. Oddly, guitarist Cerin knew exactly what Mic meant by onesies and bastards, and steered him straight.

So we got a bass recording, and in a first for KEIT, we did so using MIDI, meaning the sound is recorded not as sound waves but as a digital code, with the keyboard plugged directly into the computer. Assuming I learn how to play with MIDI recordings (I have a book), this will allow us to easily manipulate the notes. Mic's recording may, ahem, need some manipulation, but I'm not complaining. I'm happy we're on our way.

Go!

Know Eye Inn Teem's 2008 album kicked off today with a rehearsal of bassist Ann's yet-to-be-named original song. This song has a catchy tune and tells a bright story about a woman's infatuation with a tattooed coffee shop barista.

There was perhaps some foreshadowing today of what it will mean for me to be the only band member this year without musical talent: for a while there, I was just kind of a lump on the couch, entertained by Cerin and Ann assembling the song in a back-and-forth sort of way. As I experienced with my own songs, Ann had not preconceived what Cerin's guitar part would sound like when she composed it, so she presented the tune and lyrics to Cerin and they found the strokes and chords that worked.

I hauled out one of my miscellaneous drums in hopes of contributing, but, frankly, it sounded horrible when I beat on it, so I abandoned the drum and sang instead. In the eleven months since we finished our last album, I have in no way improved on my ability to sing on key, so KEIT fans will be relieved to learn that I will not be singing on the final version of this song. I was just chipping in to give us a first, rough recording so that when we come back to this song and record it for real, which may be a couple weeks from now, we won't have forgotten what it's supposed to sound like.

Everything came together in a remarkably short period of time. We actually finished rehearsal early.

Our planned playlist this year consists of 4 original songs by band members, plus covers of the following:

• Show Me The Way (Peter Frampton)
  
• Washington, D.C. (The Magnetic Fields)
  
• All Mine (Portishead)

As always at the start of this sort of endeavor, I'm feeling a little nervous about how it will all turn out. I am so psyched to have a drummer this year, but Chris is out of recording range in malaria-endemic locales for much of the month. That may be our biggest obstacle. Damn the mosquitoes. There are still a lot of question marks on the schedule, and I am not coping well with the uncertainty. But we have enough sheer talent to pull us through any rough spots.