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.

As usual, recordings are available to band members below.

Access only allowed to Moma Poka members. Please login to access the audio on this page.

In the end, we performed three half-hour sets, which were rather well received. The audience surprised us by dancing in the street to some of our songs, notably "Fragiles", "Voyages", "Imagine un soir" and "Fin".

Gear

The bass amp was an old SWR "Bassic Black", which seems to be most of the time referred to as "Basic Black". It's a surprisingly light combo, which was apparently very popular 8 years ago, but which proved incompatible with the PX4B: I had inserted it in the effects loop, but the PX4B went into larsen as soon as I injected some wet signal back. I sort of think I'll really need a dedicated pedalboard instead of relying on the PX4B outside the home practice context for which it is designed. In the end, I could only use it for the tuner function, and rely on the amp sound. Speaking of which...

Although I had rolled off the treble and medium below 50% on the amp panel, I had to cut off all treble on the Corvette to avoid sounding like an ukelele. This amp seems to have been designed for more traditional Jazz or Precision basses, not Warwick slap machines. Not very convenient.

This being said, we had time to set up properly before the concert, so I could make sure the sound was reasonably balanced 50 meters from the stage, thanks to the wireless system. Neat ! If only we always has as much time to set up stage.

"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.

Access only allowed to Moma Poka members. Please login to access the audio on this page.

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

• 
  Bass player from the "Batucada social club"
• 
  Julie from "Julie et ses Jules"

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...