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)

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.