The Swear Jar
I just realized that my old album wasn't on my new website. Mea culpa. This album was written, recorded, mixed, and mastered in 28 days during February of 2007 using Pro Tools 6.7 via an M-Audio Delta 44, FL Studio, a KORG Triton 88 Extreme Workstation, and various guitars. A little rough around the edges but I'm pretty happy with it overall, especially considering I was holding down a full time job as a game developer while recording this.
Liberation Square
Liberation Square by RegularGonzalez
Got a little nugget for you here. I'm trying to gather 10 songs for RPM this year to get me back in the swing of recording and playing regularly. I have a bunch of piano songs that have been gathering dust on demos and in my head over the past few years so I'm going to try and polish them all up into shiny pieces of musical gold.
Here's the first one, named for the location of the major world event happening during its production. I'm trying SoundCloud one more time since it appears they have stopped treating me as if I was pirating my own music.
So, let's cross our collective fingers that I can get this album done and keep putting songs up unmolested.
Incoming music
So the song-a-week thing got sidetracked by my hosting deciding I was a pirate and my job firing me. Needless to say, not much progress has been made. I'll be getting new recording equipment soon (cross fingers) and plan on doing a jazz piano album in the upcoming months. The songs are piling up, I just keep running into problems getting them out into the world.
Anyhow, Cartoon Violence, my other "band" which is still just two people, has been playing shows in the SF Bay Area. Stay tuned to www.cartoon-violence.com to find out when we're next going to be rocking the shit.
Soundcloud thinks I’m a pirate
Apparently someone reported my tracks to Soundcloud, where I've been hosting my song files, claiming I was infringing on someone else's copyright. All of my songs were taken down indiscriminately, without me being told who reported me, whose copyright I was infringing upon, or giving me any recourse to defend the accusation.
Needless to say, I will no longer be relying on them to serve my music if this is their policy. Is there a better free hosting site for music that lets me retain my rights and actually defend myself? I liked their embeddable player widget, but so far I dislike their policies.
Also, new song-a-week soon, plus some old songs dug up from the grave, assuming I can get a new host set up among my work duties and other obligations.
Radar Detector (Song-A-Week #2)
I apologize for the delay. This one took longer than I wanted for both personal and musicalogical reasons. So there's this guy Darwin Deez, and my cousin says I used to go to summer camp with him, but I don't remember him. Anyhow, he's making really catchy awesome music right now and his song "Radar Detector" has been stuck in my head for approximately forever. So, I covered it. I couldn't decide between piano and wurlitzer for my performance, so I blended the two sounds on my Triton. For the drums I recorded a few live improv takes and blended the two best.
I'll try to get the next SAW out soon to make up for the delay on this one, and it will probably be an original to avoid back-to-back covers.
Meanwhile, enjoy Song-A-Week #2: Radar Detector (originally by Darwin Deez)
Radar Detector by RegularGonzalez
Song-A-Week slightly delayed
I am working on mixing and mastering this week's song, but it will be a little late. I hit some snags with my hosting migration and I'm still having some technical difficulties. The google problem still isn't solved, so if you do manage to find this page, please bookmark http://www.regulargonzalez.com as that will always direct to the right place. Hopefully I will have all the URL stuff sorted out quickly, as well as the latest song finished, but in the mean time I have posted an old song from the vault.
While you wait for SAW #2, enjoy a song I wrote for a Song Fight competition where the challenge was to write a song with the title "We Were Not Meant To Be"
New Host and WordPress migration
Since being featured in The Creep podcast, I realized my current hosting situation would not do. Scott Johnson said "ask him for him by name" without giving my website address, but anyone searching google for "Regular Gonzalez" would get regulargonzalez.com without the all-important www. That's relevant for technical reasons because I was using google's free hosting, but it only works with custom domain names if there's a subdomain. The raw domain name can't be redirected via the method they use, but that meant that people googling me weren't finding the website I had set up and were just seeing an error instead. Since that's no way to welcome new fans to my music, I had to pull my shit together and get a new host.
Now I have proper hosting from a facility with stairs, and I am going to be using WordPress as my blog/site framework. I am pretty familiar with the package, having helped a friend set up his WP blog recently, so I should be able to work some PHP magic behind the scenes in order to add cool custom stuff and embed awesomeness in the very fabric of this website. For now, it shall be moderately bland and uncustomized. Have patience my dear listeners; a new song-a-week arrives tomorrow!
The Creep Podcast Episode 3 featuring Regular Gonzalez
Because Scott Johnson and Brian Hough have such excellent taste, they have chosen to feature my song "It's The Creep" around the 28 minute mark in episode 3 of their new podcast, The Creep. Over 700 people have already listened to the song on SoundCloud just from them tweeting it before the episode went live. I expect I may have some new fans from this, so I welcome all of you to my new internet home. I will be tweeting via @gonzalezregular so please follow me there. My Facebook page will be updated soon, and I have some really old stuff on MySpace which you can listen to if their Flash player works for you (it doesn't for me).
I am quite busy with my day job right now so there's not much here now, but I have big plans. I have 20 or 30 old demos and about as many new songs and covers I will slowly be recording, cleaning up, and putting online in the form of downloadable albums and free Song-A-Week entries. I will be getting stickers and other merchandise set up. I will be playing some shows in and around San Francisco, both solo and with my band Cartoon Violence. I will be updating this web site and probably moving from Google (which is temporary) to a more robust host.
Stay tuned, dudes and she-dudes, for there is much music in our future.
It’s The Creep (Song-A-Week #1)
Okay so here's the story... Earlier this year I needed a vacation but I was dead broke so instead I got a free 10 day trial to World of Warcraft and vacationed in Azeroth. I had enough fun in those ten days to want to stay longer and so I paid for a month of the game, got a few characters up to the mid level, and then quit when I was ready to go back to caring about my real life experience instead of experience points in WoW. I did, however, enjoy listening to The Instance podcast while I was running around The Barrens with my Troll Hunter, Barglenawdle, and his vicious red raptor, Zouss. I didn't renew my account after that one month, but I did continue listening to The Instance as I moved on to other things, including Starcraft 2.
Last Friday morning I woke up and got to work at my day job, turning on the latest episode of The Instance to provide the audio fuel for my morning productivity. Much to my surprise, the intro contained a message saying a new Starcraft podcast called "The Creep" had been started by Scott from The Instance. I immediately subscribed in iTunes and started reading the user comments, the first of which complained about the mundane intro to the show. Since I have been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 these days, I would love for The Creep to be a good podcast, and a good podcast needs a good theme song.
I broke out my Dobro, wrote down every crude joke I could think of involving the Starcraft universe, and then added a piano track to flesh out the song. I really wanted to work some of the main SC2 theme into the song, but I couldn't get it to work. Instead, I just went for a style I guess I'm calling Terran Ragtime. I've sent this off to the folks at The Creep, and we shall see what they think of it. I have not yet listened to Raid Warning, which is one of the two parent podcasts to The Creep, but from what I've heard of The Instance, I imagine my song will be well received. Whether they'll actually want to use it as a theme song shall yet be determined, but I imagine it will at least make it into the end of the show.
So, seeing as how it's Monday and I promised I'd post a new song every Monday, here is Song-A-Week #1, It's The Creep. My apologies to those outside the Starcraft universe who don't get any of the references. I hope you find the song enjoyable nonetheless, and next week's entry should be a bit less topical.