The ABCs of Do-Re-Mi

Sonichrome, the latest Orange County band about to ride on pop’s big-label dream-making machine, is a textbook example of how special things can happen when a talented musician makes a disciplined effort to stretch himself.

The textbook in question is “Secrets of Singing.”

Chris Karn got it by mail order about three years ago, when he decided that being a sharp, inventive guitarist just wasn’t enough. Inspired chiefly by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Johnny Marr of the Smiths--two non-singing guitar slingers--Karn had developed a deft instrumental touch as a teenager and helped establish the Mission Viejo band Standing Hawthorn as a local alterna-rock favorite during the early 1990s. Later, he got to tour and record playing behind ska-rock godfather Dave Wakeling in General Public and Bang.

Karn, 29, always considered singers a special breed apart and believed he lacked the natural gifts to be one of them.

One of his first vocal attempts, he said, came when he trotted out solo versions of the Beatles songs “Here Comes the Sun” and “In My Life” for two of his Hawthorn bandmates. But for Karn, holding the right notes was like trying to catch butterflies. “The other guys laughed at me. It wasn’t that good. It deserved a laugh.”

He put away any vocal ambitions until he found himself on tour with Wakeling, playing a series of radio station-sponsored alterna-rock festivals. Watching from the wings, Karn saw band after band with singers who struck him as nothing special.

“You put singers up on a pedestal and think, ‘God, these are special people, they’re born with this talent.’ ” His touring experiences disabused him of that notion.

Karn quit Bang, sent away for Jeffrey Allen’s “Secrets of Singing” and repaired to the music room upstairs in the house he and his wife rent in Mission Viejo, determined to learn how to do justice to the catchy tunes he had begun to write.

He would sing to a mirror, watching his muscles produce the tones, trying to engage the proper sinus passages and throat cavities specified in the book. He also began studying the drums because he didn’t want to rely on canned drum-machine beats for his one-man demo recordings.

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One of the first to hear Karn’s work was Rodney Mollura, a bass-playing friend from Fullerton.

“I just listened to the tape over and over again,” Mollura said. “Maybe four times in a row. I’d never done that before.”

Mollura, who made his living playing in dance-rock cover bands, began moonlighting behind Karn in a group called Judkarn (Karn’s middle name is Judd). The drummer was Stuart Johnson, a member of pop-rock hero Matthew Sweet’s band whom Karn had met while touring with Wakeling. Johnson was the first to encourage Karn that his songs were good enough to land him a record deal.

Judkarn became Twist Top after Karn decided that his transposition of his name “sounded like a German concentration camp.”

Craig Randolph of Yorba Linda, another old friend who had been playing the cover-band circuit in Los Angeles and Orange counties, took over on drums when Johnson had to tend to other musical commitments.

The trio put a cork in Twist Top when it found that a European deejay already claimed the name; Sonichrome, underscoring the band’s hopes of making colorful sound, was the next choice.

Karn’s grass-roots campaign to establish his trio and get record companies’ attention was as methodical and focused as his self-transformation into a singer.

He passed out reams of flyers at clubs, handed out tapes at the South by Southwest music industry confab in Austin, Texas, played woodshedding gigs in L.A. clubs and flunked an audition or two for big labels.

Even then, he took the blows as creative fuel for catchy songs about facing disappointment and the tension that arises between relationship obligations and a consuming career push.

Eventually, the obvious merits of Sonichrome’s music registered with labels; the band had many suitors when it signed with Capitol in December. “Breathe the Daylight,” the trio’s debut album, comes out Tuesday. (Review, F28.)

The album’s variety is delectable, not disjointed, and the book-learned Karn turns out to be a tuneful, assured, unstintingly passionate singer who sounds anything but studied in his delivery. His rule in writing songs is to keep himself entertained and edit out anything that doesn’t set the ear atwitter. “I get bored very easily. If [a musical element in a song] is not incredibly catchy and incredibly fun, why is it there?”

Karn comes off as a well-bred, scrupulously polite person, but there’s an edge to his personality that cuts through in his firm opinions about music, and in the sharpness that flickers momentarily in his voice when he speaks of past slights or disappointments--such as that time the other Hawthorn members laughed at his attempt to sing Beatles songs.

Paul Schulte, the lead singer in Standing Hawthorn, says he’s not surprised Karn was able to turn himself into a capable singer: “I don’t think Chris has a natural voice at all, but he’s so determined in everything he does, and he worked at it and worked at it. I listened to the [Sonichrome] tracks, and [the vocals] were right on in the studio.”

Karn also has a proud streak--at several points in a recent interview, he had to preface observations about Sonichrome’s merit with “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but. . . .”

He says his emotions tend to be unruly in day-to-day life, and he has learned to conceal his feelings because others don’t know what to make of the fast-moving moods when he lets them out.

“I have very hyper emotions,” he said. “I can go through a lot over a short course of time. I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t put people through it.”

Performing his songs gives him a release valve for what he normally keeps inside. “It’s kind of therapeutic. You relive things and associate them with what’s going on at the moment. When I’m playing, my mind works even faster. It seems at any given moment, something could snap. Being on the edge of tranquil and turmoil at the same time is very invigorating,” said Karn, a tall, slender fellow whose handsome, vaguely John Lennon-like looks won’t hurt Sonichrome’s chances.

In the low-keyed, studious-looking Mollura and the big, affably laid-back Randolph, Karn seems to have two easygoing henchmen who will serve as solid support while he ventilates onstage.

The trio has spent about a month on the road so far, including a handful of dates--among them a performance Sunday at the Doheny Days Festival in Dana Point--opening for label-mates Everclear, whose leader, Art Alexakis, has become a fan and mentor. Sonichrome also has been dashing about the country to play shows for radio stations that have begun airing “Honey Please.”

An acoustic ballad, “Self-Indulgent,” makes clear that Karn knows the odds are vicious in the music business, that this moment of promise with the release of a fine debut album is also a moment of great vulnerability, and that if he makes it big, there’s a chance the experience could prove somehow hollow.

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Despite such misgivings, Karn sounds nearly fanatical in his determination to have Sonichrome make its way in the world. Reminded that no pure-pop alternative-rock band from Orange County (that is, one not rooted in the predominant local strains of ska, punk and rage-metal) has made even a ripple commercially, despite some quality work, Karn has a vehement response.

“I really don’t care about that. I will kill or crush anything that gets in the way of this band,” he said. “We don’t have a fan base, and we have to work five times as hard.

“We’re going to put the blinders on, move straight ahead and work harder than anybody out there,” Karn said. “If you have to do four shows in a day, then drive 12 hours to do the whole thing over again, go ahead and do it. To sit at home thinking, ‘I didn’t do everything I could’ would be the most pitiful place to be.”

* Sonichrome plays Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Doheny Days music festival at Doheny State Beach, 25300 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. The show starts at 11 a.m., with Everclear, Royal Crown Revue, Seven Mary Three and others also on the bill. $22-$45. (949) 262-2662 (taped information), (714) 258-0333 or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).