About six months ago, I started our spring concerts series with a brand new set of Elixir medium bass strings, based on the various recommendations I had found regarding these, centering notably on their long life span. In spite of the various warnings I had read about their peculiar tone, I thought I'd give them a chance to prove their worth.

A few months ago, I discovered the Lilypond music typesetting system, and thought I had stumbled upon some sort of holy grail: here was an open source system which, at last, allowed me to write music much like program code, and did not jump me through the hoops of a UI in order to create scores and the MIDI files representing them.

The block party is over, and the concert went reasonably well: rain on monday, rain on wednesday, and nice weather on tuesday, just when we played !

Some photos from the party are available on Flickr.

"Immeubles en fête" is a yearly block party held everywhere in France.

Come and hear us at the Villebon event, on 2007-05-29 19:00 to 22:00 !

Le problème de prise de son du jour: sans trépied, l'enregistreur était entre la batterie et l'ampli basse, ET le réglage de sensibilité micro était sur MID au lieu de LOW.

Uniquement "Eteins la Lumière" et mon thème du 25/4/7 ("07D25"). Attention : hormis les premiers, les enregistrements sont saturés: j'avais réorienté l'enregistreur pour viser un peu moins le plafond, et visiblement ce n'est pas à faire: le chant et la batterie ont saturé les micros.

Enregistrements corrects, RAS. Surtout du travail sur Le Fou

Although technical problems (batteries !) prevented a full recording of the concert, the middle section is now available to group members.

Regrettably, until licensing terms are cleared up, these recordings cannot be made public.

In the meantime, here are a couple of shots from musicians playing in the other bands that night:

For some reason, I had never bothered to pursue the relationship between string gauge and actual string diameter. However, when I sorted my stash of old strings after putting brand new Elixir medium strings in order to sound best at next week's concert, I found several strings for which I didn't know the gauge, meaning they would be next to useless in case of an emergency (which is typically the only situation under which I'd put on a used string). And I only had a metric vernier caliper available...