I just realized I haven’t posted anything new in quite a while, but the most exciting thing that happened so far is Kate Kane, of the awesome band Lipstick Homicide, is playing drums for us now! We’ve been practicing with her for the past month and it’s been great, both me and Billy really missed practicing with a real drummer instead of the junky drum machine on Billy’s effects pedal. So anyway I think that’s all I have to say about that for now, but if you’re bored you should check out Jack Denlinger, I found his page while browsing music on Alonetone. His music kind of reminds me of music from SNES RPG’s like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. I always liked the music from Chrono Trigger, I think it’s amazing, especially songs like Tyran Castle, Corridors of Time, Frog’s Theme, Schala’s Theme, Gato’s Song, and a bunch of others. I found this website with mp3’s of all the songs if you wanna take a listen, some of them have the wrong names, Corridors of Time is renamed “Time Circuits”, Frog’s Theme just says “Theme”, Schala’s theme says “) Theme”, and Gato’s Songs just says “Song”, but I think they’re all there.

Just wanted to post a quick update since the last one was at the end of August.
Billy started taking bass lessons again so he can get better at the bass faster than he would trying to learn on his own. He seems to have a much better teacher this time too. His last one kinda sucked, and in my opinion set him back rather than brought him forward in his bass playing abilities. But Billy really likes this new teacher who seems to be younger and fits his musical style much better than the other one who was really old and only into Jazz music.

Also, I’ve been wanting to record two new songs that I wrote but haven’t been able to because now that I have a drum set here I really want to use real drums instead of drum samples for them. I want to have more control over the drum sound than what I get with samples, plus I don’t want the cymbals sounding so fake like they do with samples. Only problem is I’m not very good at playing drums so whenever I’ve tried to record any drum tracks for the songs I’m never satisfied with them, plus usually I’m only able to record at night which doesn’t work out well either because of the noise. This is also the reason why I haven’t posted a follow up to my post at benjivaldez.com about how to record and mix a complete song.

So anyway that’s what we’ve both been up to, maybe when Billy gets a little better at the bass I’ll look for a drummer for us, then I won’t have to worry about recording the drum tracks to those songs myself, or maybe I’ll ask my brother if he has time to do it. Until next time.

Welp, I haven’t updated the website in about five months now which kinda sucks, but now I have and there’s a bunch of new things I’ve done. First off I got rid of the old menu, it was too much of a hassle to deal with all those images, plus there was way too many menu items. I kept wanting to add more but it just made it way too cluttered, but now I’ve got this drop down menu that I found at www.lwis.net/free-css-drop-down-menu/, and with it I can add a few menu items, then add more and have them drop down as sub menu items. Plus it’s licensed under the GNU General Public License, which is awesome, I love Free Open Source Software. I slightly modified the dropdown.css and combined the default.css and default.ultimate.css files (as a result mines a little messed up, like on the audio and video page where the menu drops behind the flash elements, I’m still working on that) and as per the GPL the sources are available here and here. I didn’t modify the javascript files though since I didn’t understand them.
Next, I finally bought a real domain name, it’s now sonador.me (all the good ones like .com and .net were taken). No more stupid looking ones like sonador.freehostia.com, or the .tk domain name, which didn’t work quite like I thought it was suppose to.
While I was getting the sonador.me domain name I decided to get one at benjivaldez.com too. I think I’ll have that website be geared more about random stuff that interests me and less about Sonador. I don’t have it set up yet, but check back soon ’cause I’ll probably have it up shortly.
[EDIT: It's set up now, go ahead and click the link to visit it if you want]

I finally got this song sounding to the point where I’m somewhat satisfied with it enough to upload it. Anyway I wrote this when me and Billy were going up to practice with Mike a long time ago. On one trip up there we stopped at this gas station we thought was open but turned out to be closed in the middle of the day for some reason. So then we went across the street to this restaurant that had a gas station attached to it, but the hoses to the gas pumps were gone. So we went inside to use the bathroom and it was pretty shitty and disgusting looking so we hurried up and got the hell outta there. Billy said the restaurant reminded him of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Anyway you can listen to it or download it in the audio section. Also as a bonus I uploaded the demo of it with the rest of those old demo songs from a few posts down, so go here to listen to it if ya want.

Remember a few posts down when I told you that my sister’s boyfriend [EDIT: ex-boyfriend] wanted me to start another band with him and I’d post a link to the myspace page when it was created? Well guess what my friend, that day has come. They’ve decided to call themselves Acoma, so to anyone who may be interested in this other band here’s the link: http://www.myspace.com/acoma08
Their isn’t much really there at the moment, but soon we’ll have more pics, songs, etc. so stay tuned, and in the meantime you can add us if ya want.

(Edit: Acoma is no more, it wasn’t really a real band anyway)