Sonador » News

And now for a taste of things to come

Benji — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:43:41 +0000

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 a quick update

Benji — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:23:09 +0000

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.

A lot of new stuff added

Benji — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:04:51 +0000

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]

New song, Montezuma, posted

Benji — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:42:39 +0000

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.

That other band that I’m in

Benji — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:05:13 +0000

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)

A rant about the iPod Touch

Benji — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:51:39 +0000

Alright, so I received an iPod Touch a few months ago and it seemed like a cool little toy at first but now I think I’ve realized that it’s got a few annoying flaws that I wish they would fix. It seems to me that they tried too hard with the internet/wifi part and kinda put the music part of it aside and didn’t worry about it as much. I think the most annoying thing for me is the lock thing, every time the stupid screen goes black you have to unlock the damn thing when you want to mess with it again. So lets say you’ve got your iPod Touch hooked up to your car stereo like I do, then all of a sudden you get a call on your cell phone. Well I had a 3rd generation iPod and all you had to do was tap the ‘ol pause button and answer you phone, but not with the iPod Touch. First you’ve got to press one of the buttons to turn the screen back on, then you have to slide that fucking unlock thing, then you finally get to press pause, which by the way doesn’t always register, so your sitting their tapping at this fucking iPod trying to get it to pause all while your driving and trying to hurry before your phone stops ringing. I guess they figured your just suppose to turn down your radio’s volume and miss all the songs that are playing while your pre-occupied with your phone call. (Edit- Later I found out you can tap the bottom button twice in succession to get the pause screen to pop up without having to slide to unlock it, but trying to tap that damn pause button and get it to register while driving is still a chore. I also found out that if you just unplug it from the headphone jack it automatically pauses, so that’s what I do now).
Another thing is the on-the-go playlist. I liked how the 3rd gen. iPod was, you just went and pick the songs you wanted to add by going to a song and holding down the middle button on it until it blinked to tell you it was added to the on-the-go playlist. Then you could go and play that song from the playlist and continue adding songs to the on-the-go playlist and it would automatically play them one right after the other. The iPod Touch doesn’t do that, if you add a song and then play it, and then go back and start adding more songs it won’t play the songs you’ve just added until you go back through all the menus and press the little done button. Although mine is version 1.1.4 because I don’t wanna upgrade and not be able to jailbreak it, so I’m not sure, maybe they’ve fixed this since version 2.0, but even so it was kind of silly to ship it like that anyway. (Edit: This seems to work on my iPod Touch now. I never updated it, still 1.1.4, but I think I may have restore it once or twice since I wrote this article. I’m not sure if that’s why it’s working now or because I was doing something wrong before, it’s anyone’s guess).
I think the last thing that would have been nice is adding a mic or line in jack so that you could record voice notes like on the iPhone. I think I’d prefer a line in jack for the simple fact that I found this app for the iPhone that is a simple four track recorder which would be cool if you all of a sudden got a song idea and the only thing you had on you was your iPod Touch. You could just quickly record into it without any problems, but the iPod Touch doesn’t get this without buying an external mic, but even then I’ve read that the iPod Touch is picky and some of them don’t work on it. I sure with my 3rd gen. iPod wouldn’t have broke, I’d so be using it for music instead right now. I think they should combine the two like this:

Anyway this doesn’t really have anything to do with the band, but I felt like ranting about it so there it is.

A recording of us jamming

Benji — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:02:02 +0000

About a month and a half ago Billy and I were jamming while I was waiting for the members of this other band I’m in to show up. I decided to record ourselves on a crappy little boom box to test the sound for the other band. Anyway I kinda liked it and decided to post it here, even though the sound quality is shitty, you can’t really hear what I’m saying, and Billy doesn’t know how to play the drums . So here it is, in both mp3 and FLAC formats, enjoy.

I’ve got another cool band to tell you about

Benji — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 07:26:21 +0000

So remember in my last post when I said to go see Lipstick Homicide last Tuesday? Well guess what, if you didn’t you should have because not only would you have seen Lipstick Homicide put on a fucking amazing show, another awesome band called The Blacks played, and they fuckin’ rocked too. But guess what? Unlike when we saw Baby Guts with Lipstick Homicide that one time and I only could get one of their cd’s, this time I was able to get not only The Blacks’ cd but also a 7 inch and a shirt. I’m listening to their CD ‘Nom de Guerre‘ right now, these are some cool frikin’ tunes! I only wish I would have been able to see them play again the next day at the Picador, but unfortunately I had other plans, it being New Years and all.

The musical journey of Sonador

Benji — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:39:31 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates, we’re kind of in a transition phase at the moment. Though I always have this feeling that nobody really reads this anyway so I kinda doubt that it matters that I write this. But nonetheless just in case anyone who reads this crap that I write every so often is wondering what’s going on, I just have this to say: be patient hopefully new and exciting things are about to happen, or perhaps not, who really knows anyway? Of course now that I thought about it for a bit I think the reason I really post is to show the band is in fact active. So every time I post something, no matter how irrelevant or insignificant, it shows the band isn’t dead, and I still maintain the site even though my last post was something like three weeks ago.
Oh yeah, before I forget, even though I don’t really think anyone reads this, just in case they do I wanted to say Lipstick Homicide is playing this Tuesday on the 30th, and anyone who sees this before then should go see them because they’re awesome. Check out their myspace page for info on where it’s at and stuff.

Some old demo songs for your enjoyment

Benji — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:53:33 +0000

Since I didn’t quite have a song uploaded for last month I decided to at least share these old demo songs we made a long time ago when we went up and practiced with Mike one time. They aren’t that great of quality and their isn’t any vocals in them, but hopefully they’ll compensate a little for the lack of a song for last month. We actually did three songs that day, but one of them is the song I wanted to post for last month, so I decide to just post two so that I don’t spoil the surprise. (UPDATE: The third song, Montezuma, had been uploaded.)
These songs were all recorded by me on my Tascam 4 track Portasudio MKIII, with me on guitar, Billy on bass, and Mike on the drums. Anyway I’ll put the one I omitted up with the others when I’m finished re-recording it, and have uploaded it to the audio section. So without further adieu, here’s the link to those demo songs.

Yep that’s right I’m late

Benji — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:05:45 +0000

Yes I’m late putting up a new song, but in all fairness the holiday didn’t make it easy since I was out of town for about two weeks of this month. I had just enough time to record the guitar, bass, and program the drums, but I wasn’t able to get a decent vocal take before I left. I think I’m also being kinda picky with this one since it’s kinda my favorite one I’ve written so far, so I want it to sound as good as I can make it. I promise it won’t take nine months to finish though.
In other news, our myspace page got bumped down on the scroogle search for sonador, it seems to fluctuate a lot though, because I checked it three times and the first time it was at thirteen, the second time it was at ten, and the third time it was at eleven. Here’s a screenshot for your amusement:

Our myspace page made it into the top ten!

Benji — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:15:35 +0000

I just checked and if you search sonador on scroogle our myspace page comes up as number eight on the list! Yay! I also checked on google to see if we made the front page or if the advertisements pushed us off on to the second page, but they didn’t, our myspace page is on the front page of google when you search sonador too! Double Yay!

Joining another new original band

Benji — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:24:46 +0000

My sister’s boyfriend [EDIT: ex-boyfriend] asked me if I wanted to start another band with him, he used to play in The Noise Vandals with me (a cover band I’m in which seems to be going nowhere at the moment). Since he already has a bass player and a drummer I decided that I would. Of course this doesn’t mean Sonador is over with or anything, I’ve already got the guitar, bass, and drum tracks recorded to the next song I plan on posting to the site before the month is over. I’m still hoping we find a drummer for ourselves, but until we do I’m gonna jam out with him in this other band, and if we do find another member for Sonador I’ll probably just stay in both bands, lots of other people do it. So just like with The Noise Vandals I’m posting this in case anyone is interested, I’ll post a link here when a band name/myspace page/website is created.

Expect a new song at least every month!

Benji — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:03:17 +0000

I decided that we don’t have enough songs up on the website, as a matter of fact the last one was recorded about nine months ago. But it’s not like I haven’t been writing songs, I just haven’t been recording them. I have a ton of songs written, but I think I’ve just been waiting for us to find a drummer to really record them. Well, I think instead I’m just going to record what I have with DrumTrack and Hydrogen, and when we do find a drummer, then we’ll just re-record them, because actually I’m still learning mixing techniques so the quality of these recordings compared to others aren’t the best anyway. Mostly they’re just something to show what we sound like, and the direction we’re headed musically. So I’ve decided that to keep myself motivated with this, I’m going to record at least one of the songs I’ve written every month and upload it to the site. Perhaps I’ll get to the point of doing it more often, but at least nobody will have to wait nine frikin’ months just to hear a new song from us. So in that spirit (and because October is almost over with), I’ve uploaded a new song called Break It, you can listen to or download it in the audio section.
Oh yeah, before I forget, I also decided to get rid of the ogg vorbis format in favor of the lossless FLAC format. If you have no idea what ogg or FLAC is don’t worry, just download the mp3’s and be happy. But for those who actually do use oggs you probably also know what FLAC is and how to convert FLAC to ogg if you need to, so really nothing’s been lost. But if for some strange reason you do know what ogg is but not FLAC, you can use BonkEnc to convert FLAC to ogg. And for those of you who’s curiosity has been peaked, FLAC is an audio format that has no loss in quality like a wav file, but is compressed so it’s a lot smaller than a wav file. Mp3 and ogg music files are lossy, meaning they are of lesser quality because of the compression method used to make them much smaller than FLACs and wavs. But anyway, enjoy the new and upcoming music.

Check out this cool Minneapolis band!

Benji — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:00:47 +0000

We went and saw Lipstick Homicide last night, and a punk band called Baby Guts opened the show. Afterwards I got their latest CD, The Kissing Disease, while Billy got that and their EP, Gasoline (I didn’t have enough money for both but I did get a free button ) Anyway you should definitely check them out, they also have a website at www.babyguts.com
I hope they play more shows near us, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again, they were pretty fuckin’ cool. If they’re playing a show near you go see them, they’re awesome.

The greedy major labels are at it again

Benji — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:25:01 +0000

Oddly enough just a little while after posting my article about using advertisements to pay for music on this site I came across this while trying to figure out how to download songs on that damn new myspace music player (it seems you can’t anymore). Looks like the majors are trying to screw the indies again, and myspace plans on helping them. Like I was saying before, if we had ads on the site it wouldn’t be nearly as bad knowing that you’re helping support the band by visiting the site and referring friends which would result in more ad clicks to help us pay for our musical expenditures. Well it looks like the Majors plan on doing this and more through myspace and completely excluding the unsigned and indie artist from joining their little circle. As the article states this is going to make myspace turn into what MTV is now, nothing worth spending any time on anymore. What’s really sad is that most people probably wont even know, or even care for that matter. It’s kind of unfortunate that myspace had to become the popular one. Sites like reverbnation, last.fm, and Earn It Yourself are much better for bands than myspace is anyway.
UPDATE: last.fm kinda just screwed over independent artists, they only allow people from the US, England, and Germany to listen songs for free now. Anyone from any other countries (Canada, Mexico, South America, etc.) have to pay a membership fee now which really sucks because our play count was actually quite high on list.fm, but since they did this our play count now is practically nil. So they fucked over their users because they can’t try to find cool indie artists to listen to anymore, and they fucked over indie artists because they don’t get exposure to anyone from those countries anymore.
Reverbnation actually shares their ad revenue with the artists (I think it’s 50%) plus provides a ton of tools to help artists with promotion and stuff. Last.fm pays artist royalties whenever anyone listens to their song on their website and internet radio. While Earn It Yourself encourages bands to take the DIY approach, helps find and trade gigs, and provides a number of articles that would be useful to any musician. It’s really sucks that myspace is turning out this way, since the whole reason I liked it when I first found out about it was the fact that I could look up local underground music in my area easily. It’s the reason I know of and listen to all the bands listed in our links section. I never gave a shit for the social networking aspect of it all, but the fact that I could look up bands in my area and listen to their songs to see if I liked them, then see if they were playing any shows in the my area that I could go to was just too cool.
Though this shouldn’t be too surprising, myspace never seemed to show any interest in indie bands at all anyway. Take a look at the reverbnation site, they have a little section on the front page showing local artist in your area to check out. When was the last time you remember myspace putting a little thing on their front page like that for local indie musicians? Yep, that’s what I thought, never. Though I remember seeing all kinds of crap about major label musicians that I could care less for. Oh well, I’ve always found myspace quite limiting anyway, which is the reason I created this site in the first place. Hopefully anyone who stumbles across our myspace page and likes our music will also click the links to this website that I put on it. I’m thinking that myspace should only be used as a promotional tool for us indie musicians if this is the way things are going to be. If myspace and the majors don’t wanna share then screw ‘em, I’ll tell our fans to come here for updates instead of myspace.

Making money by giving songs away for free

Benji — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:09:13 +0000

I’m doing some work on the website, so if some things seem odd or just aren’t working right don’t worry I’m in the process of fixing them.
Also I was reading this article and thought it was kind of interesting. This guy gives away free content to his viewers and lets advertisements pay for his website and pretty much everything else he does. Which made me think, what if a band tried this approach? With so many major labels bitching about people “stealing” artist’s music (which I think is bullshit, but that’s a post for another time) what’s to stop them from doing what this guy is doing. Like what if we put up all our music in high quality lossless FLAC format for free and put up a couple of ads and a donation thing on the site and let that pay for the costs of recording/mixing/mastering/website hosting/touring/living/etc. I think that would be kind of cool, I would love to be able to go to my favorite band’s website and grab whatever song I wanted for free and at the same know that I’m helping support them just by visiting their site. I would also be able to tell my friends to go check out this great band and download and listen to their music, and the band would get payed from my friends visiting their website.
Although I know the downside is that nobody likes ads (especially me) but on the other hand when you know that they’re being used in this manner (for good instead of evil) I don’t think it’s so bad. The website above talks about how if he put annoying pop up ads and the kind that fly across your screen he would make more money, but he doesn’t because it degrades the user experience to much, I thought that was pretty cool.
Anyway I think I’m going to keep this in mind, it sounds neat to me since it would give us more time to work on songs and stuff instead of having to work ‘real’ jobs to pay for all the recording/mixing/mastering/website hosting/touring/living/etc. stuff and try to squeeze in time for music.

Mop and Bucket

Benji — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:09:14 +0000

My nephew got an incomplete mini drumset and Billy and I decided to jam out on it about three weeks ago. Billy was playing a crappy acoustic guitar and I played the drums. After a little while of jamming Billy was like “You know this is exactly what I imagined Mop and Bucket would sound like.” Mop and Bucket was a fake band Billy made up in an art class we had when we were in high school. The thing was you had to make a cd cover insert of a fake band, or create a new cd cover insert of an already existing band. Billy made a hilarious cover of a band he made up called Mop and Bucket where the guitarist was a mop playing a guitar, and a bucket banging on itself with a pair of drumsticks. Anyway I decided to recorded it on my phone, and later posted it on youtube. The quality is pretty shitty since it’s a cell phone, but it’s kinda funny. Well, at least we think its funny anyway. I also made captions for it that you can access by clicking the bottom right arrow of the video, I couldn’t remember or make out all of what Billy was saying so I just put questions marks at some parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYwGBFrFnVE

Oh yeah, the cover band I’m in finally decided on a name, here’s the myspace link: The Noise Vandals

.tk domain name

Benji — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:44:56 +0000

I made a .tk domain name for the website. It looks like myspace went and blacklisted links from any site that came from freehostia.com. So all the links on the myspace page to this website were broken and myspace gave a message that this site was a phishing or spam site and that’s why the link no longer worked…fuckin’ myspace, can’t they do anything right? Anyway .tk doesn’t seem to be blacklisted, so the links are restored now.

Still practicing, new cover band

Benji — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:29:12 +0000

Just wanted to note that Billy and I are actually still practicing together. Last weekend we came up with a couple of new tunes, and the weekend before that we came up with a couple of melodies.
Also, the past couple of months I’ve been practicing in a cover band I helped start when I was asked to play at a family party. If we ever decide on a name I’ll post a myspace link here for whoever might be interested.