• The first band we saw (only for around 10 minutes, though) was Nidingr, a black metal band. I have to say I didn’t really like them, and I didn’t even expect to like them that much, but there wasn’t anything else that I liked at that time slot, and the drummer playing in that band was Jan Axel Blomberg, Arcturus drummer. I really like how he played in Arcturus, but with Nidingr it was just very fast, uninteresting metal drumming. Oh well.
• Then we went to Victoria Jazzscene for something completely different: Chili Vanilla. This band is the weirdest jazz trio I’ve ever seen, comprised of voice, drums… and tuba. No piano, no guitar, no bass, no horns… just tuba and drums supporting the voice. It sounded quite interesting, possibly the best of the night.
• Then we checked the Danish punk-rock band Black City for a moment (just a few songs), but although they didn’t sound band, it wasn’t all that interesting and there were other bands we wanted to see…
• …so we went to see 22, a really glam-looking rock band. Some songs reminded me of Red Hot Chili Peppers (from relatively long time ago, that is), and other reminded me of Placebo. Although the whole paraphernalia and “marketing” was a bit teenage for my taste, they were quite fun to listen to and see live.
• After that we went to see Mary Me Young, a band I had already seen in Øyafestivalen. Although maybe their music has to evolve a bit, they reminded me of Veruca Salt, a band I used to like a lot (if you don’t know VS, check out Seether or Number One Blind). Cool band, and the bar had Havana 7 :-P
• And the end for us was Kommode, Eirik Glambek Bøe’s (of Kings of Convenience fame) new project. I think I like KoC better (their concert last year was amazing), but it was a pretty cool concert too.

All in all a fun night.

So I sent a message to some internal company mailing list to see if there was anyone interested. And boy were they interested. Four people replied, and the best is that it was a singer, two guitar players and a piano player. So we decided to look for a place to rehearse, found the amazing Øvingshotellet and gave it a try. One of the guitar players was really put off by Jazz, so ended up being five: voice, guitar, piano, bass and drums.

It was funny because I was exceptionally bad at the time (October 2009; now I’m just very bad), and had never played Jazz before. And of course Jazz is the scariest style to start with, also when you play drums. But somehow we managed to stick together and play for another week, and another, and another, and after some months someone said “we should start looking for a gig, you know? So we have a goal to focus on and all that. Otherwise this will just be fooling around”. We were a bit scared of playing in front of people because we didn’t sound that great (not that we sound that great now, but it was definitely much worse back then). Somewhere in the middle of that we decided to choose “Not a Number” as a band name (the story is longer and more complicated… and boring, so I’ll skip it). I even made a funny logo resembling another band‘s logo.

And it happened: we got this opportunity to play in Opera’s 15th anniversary Summer Party last Friday, August 27th, and we went for it. Unfortunately the only recordings we have are of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what we got. And after the next-to-disaster situation we experienced right before the gig, exemplified by the comic below, it’s not such a tragedy that we didn’t end up with a proper recording.The gig was quite short, only 5 songs, but we felt really good while playing and had a lot of fun. Apparently some people liked it even! And we were lucky enough to even have a “guest star” playing sax in the last two songs. The set list was:

1. Maiden Voyage
2. Some Day My Prince Will Come
3. High & Dry
4. Autumn Leaves
5. Summertime

If someone had told me this “playing with Chris at my place so I don’t get bored of drums” was going to end up like this…

UPDATE: It seems some people have trouble downloading or listening to Ogg files, so I’ve uploaded the recordings to SoundCloud and I’ve embedded the concert recordings down here:
Summer Party Concert – Aug 2010 by Not a Number

UPDATE 2: And now also in HTML5 (you’ll only see it if you have a modern, decent browser):

Maiden Voyage:

Some Day My Prince Will Come:

High & Dry:

Autumn Leaves:

Summertime:

My basic requirement was that it must play Ogg Vorbis, and ideally also Flac, apart from MP3. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time comparing and looking for the ideal player, and of course I didn’t want it to be very expensive, but I didn’t really have more requirements that the music formats.

Long story short, I ended up buying an iRiver Spinn. One of the reasons was that it was relatively cheap, and another reason was that I thought it was nice supporting iRiver, to my knowledge the first company that really cared about Ogg Vorbis as a format for portable music players, many years ago.

I have to say I’m disappointed with it. While I don’t have such strong feelings about music players and it’s not like I’m not going to use it, there are a number of things that were (negatively) surprising or didn’t meet my expectations:

• It has trouble with UTF-8. I’m sorry, last time I checked it was 2010. iRiver guys, W T F ?
• I have had a bunch of problems (many of them unresolved) with the song order. I have set the track order in the tags, but it still gets the order wrong. Typically it orders alphabetically by title in the tag (not filename). How the fuck is that useful?
• It has a touchscreen, which most of the time you don’t really have to use… but it’s not exactly responsive, so when you have to use it it’s very annoying.
• When I turned it on for the first time, it seemingly had a lot of songs already loaded. When you tried to play any of them, it would do nothing so it was quite confusing. Navigating through the menus (inside a menu called “SET” -> “Advanced”) I found a “Rebuild library” option. Using that option “refreshes” the idea the player has of what your library looks like, and of course it turned out empty (ie. no sample tracks included by default). Also, every time you copy or delete new music you are apparently expected to use that option again. While I don’t mind having to do it as I don’t copy/remove music very often, it’s just dumb and bad design.
• The USB cable you need to charge/load songs is not a standard mini-USB. From what I can see it’s a proprietary USB cable, which is an amazingly moronic design decision to make. If I lose that cable I’ll probably not buy another one from them, I’ll just buy a new player and never again buy from iRiver.

In summary, I’m not going to throw it away or anything, but I’m disappointed with the iRiver Spinn. When I stop using it, I’m going to consider stop using those altogether and just start using my phone for listening to music. It might turn out to be cheaper, more practical and less disappointing.

Disclaimer: I have no idea about music programs and my needs were a bit “special” (typesetting drums, not “normal notes”), so take my comments with a grain of salt.

The programs I tried were Rosegarden, NtEd, NoteEdit, Lilypond, Canorus and MuseScore. I’m sure there are more, but those were the ones I had the patience to try, and they were conveniently packaged for Debian. My final pick was MuseScore, but as I said YMMV.

Rosegarden is, according to its website, a “well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment”. It seems like quite a complex beast, and probably capable of a lot of things (most of them I’m not really interested in of course). I think it took me a while to figure out how to fire up the music score editing interface, and once I did, I couldn’t see anything that helped typesetting drums. While I could have typeset the notes in their correct places, I didn’t find a way to change the “head” of the notes (like for the hi-hats and stuff, see the Lilypond documentation for drums). Thus, discarded.

NtEd didn’t seem bad (althought I find the UI really ugly), but it seemed a bit painful to use the keyboard and I couldn’t figure out how to add “lyrics” (for the comments on using left or right hand). Also, it doesn’t have any notion of drums, so I would have had to change all the types of note heads all the time (using the mouse, which involves extra pain).

Noteedit also looked nice, but again I couldn’t figure out the lyrics, keyboard usage seemed suboptimal and it had no special shortcuts or options for drums.

I also considered using writing Lilypond by hand. What I wanted seemed simple enough to be writable by hand, but adding lyrics and possibly a second voice didn’t seem so fun anymore (it looks more like programming than typesetting).

Canorus looks quite simple, but it seems to lack, again, good keyboard input and any kind of drum typesetting support (I can’t see how to change the note heads, again). Also I can’t seem to find any option for adding lyrics.

Finally, MuseScore seemed to match my needs. Although it did take a bit of time to figure out certain things, and I don’t completely get the keyboard usage, it seems easy enough for what I wanted, the lyrics input is very clear and easy, and the output is quite good (although probably most, if not all, these programs really use Lilypond as backend, so I guess all of them look good). The downside is that the Debian package in the current Debian Sid is quite unstable, so I have to save very often :-/

Kudos to them. I just listened to the album for the first time, I will probably like it when I can make an informed opinion. At least the first impression was better than with Year Zero.

Also, looking around in the Net I was saw that they seem to be good Internet citizens, having at least a YouTube and Flickr users…