Luck has been with me during this year, musically speaking at least. A few days ago, I met the person that might be the latest member of IceWind, Roland the drummer.

Now we are 4 at last, Tom on bass, Sarah singing, Roland on drums, and me with the 6 stringed tool. First rehearsal all 4 together will be next week, and things are looking good.

Since the three others have been playing together for a few months already, we’ll soon be live-ready.

Finally, a few of our own compositions are on the way, to be posted here one day.

Especially a drummer.

But apart from that, it’s looking good out there. I’ve been playing with a bass-player friend for a few months already, and we’re improving a lot. A singer also came to the last session, and the three of us did a good job of covering other bands’ music.

Our drummer is still Cubase’s LM4 markII, but the overall thing sounds nice. We’re really looking forward to find somewhere to play where we can turn the volume to 11, instead of playing with my home setup which is quite limited.

Hopefully more good news to come soon! Meanwhile,

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

I haven’t been in a very good musical mood for a while, and that’s one of the reasons why there hasn’t been any news here.

Well, some good news to start the year then: IceWind could become a real band soon. I met some people who would be interested in joining me to create music together, and if everything goes well, we should start playing together soon. I hope this works out and we can have a demo posted here during the year.

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

I just hate bot subscribers, and spam in general. Because of the amount of bot subscribers I get, I might have lost any possible “real” subscriber while cleaning up the database.

If such a thing happened, please mail me telling so, and re-create your account.

For new subscribers, please fill in some bio, and a valid e-mail address, so I can confirm if you’re real. I’ll try to manage this as good as I can.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

p.s. I’m well aware that there isn’t such a thing as a subscriber in this website, and that no-one cares about my crappy band that doesn’t even exist anyway, but I guess I just needed, for a while, to believe that someone cared.

After waiting for a few weeks, and testing the new version of WordPress in my other website, I finally decided to update here. Everything seems to be running fine, so that’s cool. If only my guitar recording could run that well, that’d be great, wouldn’t it?

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

Short ago, I bought a set of mics. Both Shures, the sm57 (instrument recording) and sm58 (vocals recording). These are going to be very helpful to finish the demo. They’ll maybe be the little motivation I needed to finally record the guitar parts?

Also, in the meantime, I added a chat widget to the contact page. Whenever I am online, this widget will have green lights, and you can simply open the page and chat with me. If you think you will be coming more than once, please remember to choose a nickname, so I know who I’m speaking with!

See you soon.

..::Habey Gonzo, Out::..

No guitar recording has been done since we moved to 2008. That’s a lot of time. But it doesn’t mean that I have been idle all this time.

On one hand, I started to give guitar lessons after work, what leaves me less time, and on the other, I decided to move my playing to the next level, by practicing much more, and with a more methodical way. I just named the scales, and their possible combinations. Playing scales, shredding exercises using scales and similar things have become incredibly helpful to improve my playing skills. Since I’m a shredd-loving metalhead, it fits the goal that I set to myself some time ago.

So no recording yet. And it probably won’t be done for a while.

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

The bass for every song (except Jabberwocky, but there is no bass in that one) is now recorded. It’s ok, since the delay has not been as huge as it used to be, I’m still almost on schedule.

I‘m working on the guitar right now, but don’t think it will be finished in 2007. Maybe before February 2008 every guitar will be ready. I also found someone from who I could borrow an SM-58 mic, to record the voice. That could be really helpful.

So the next steps will be:

• replay every song to be precise again with a guitar after all this bass time.
• adjust the sounds, find the right FX for each track and song.
• record the guitar.
• give singing a try (never done that, I mean, in a serious way).
• record the voice.
• mix the whole enchilada.

2008 will tell how the story continues. Till then…

..::Habey Gonzo, out::..

During the last months, scripts in websites, flash, pop-up junk and other net crap have been pissing me off. Till now the only user friendly advertiser would be Google, with its non-intrusive text ads (and no flashing stuff).

So I started to search for stuff to help my net browsing being safer, and less frustrating, and found a set of Firefox extensions that could be helpful for some of you (ok, no need to remind me that no-one reads this page. Thanks). While searching, I found some others that, even if not security related, are just nice or useful. Here they are:

• Adblock / Adblock plus: does simply what the name says. An ad bothers you? Right click it, and say “block”. Can even block everything from a specific ad provider. Blocks flash and image links, as well as iframes.
• NoScript: again, what the name says. Removes javascript, java, flash… from unauthorized pages, making it safer to be online. Helps with some ads as well.
• ProxySel: if you want privacy, you can easily switch from several proxys with this tool. It even supports TOR, if installed.
• GMail notifier: notifies you when a new mail reaches your GMail account. That’s all.
• Yahoo! mail notifier: same thing, but for Yahoo! mail.
• Colorful tabs: an absolutely useless extension, but still cute. Makes each FF tab a different color.
• Download status bar: replaces the download tool with a bar at the bottom of the screen. It’s easier to keep everything on the same monitor in that way.
• FireFTP: not very stable FTP, but when needing a fast upload or download, it avoids having to use a standalone soft.

Today is the day of the ninja. I don’t feel like writing, so here is the link: http://dayoftheninja.com