Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Anyone tried JamKazam for online jams?

#1

A Facebook friend just did a review on JamKazam and said he was thoroughly impressed with the performance for a little 3 man jam session. He said it took some tweaking of the audio gear, and an analog mic set up worked better than a USB mic, but overall, he was very pleased with the results.

If anyone here has played with it, what did you think, and would you be interested in trying it out with a small group?

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#2

Mark,

I tried it with a couple of friends early on in the quarantine. It was marginally successful. Here are a couple of learnings we had:

  1. Use audio only, no video to minimize the lag.
  2. Use an ethernet cable from your router to your PC rather than WiFi, again, to minimize the lag. It made a huge difference.
  3. Play at slower tempos. We were able to keep it together at slower tempos but if we tried to pick it up things fell apart. This could be lag, it could also be that it’s just harder to communicate with each other during an online jam.
  4. Play songs everyone knows. It’s not a great forum for working out new ideas. If everyone knows the tune then it’s easier to communicate and play together.
  5. Use headphones for the audio. I tried using earbuds for the audio but they couldn’t handle it - switching to proper headphones was a big improvement.

I’m sure that if we persevered a lot of the unsatisfying aspects would have faded but ultimately we just sort of lost interest because it felt like we spent a lot of time and effort for little in return. That being said… I’d give it another shot!

-Stephen

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#3

Cool! I’d be down for some slow jams. Were you just using a standard PC mic to play in to?I’m thinking I might have to buy at least one piece of gear. I have a nice USB mic, but I read they cause some delay.

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#4

I’d be down to give it a shot if some people wanted to do it.

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#5

Something that just occurred to me is that, if this turns out to be a viable jam solution, I could use it to help keep me accountable for learning new lessons. I just told Ben yesterday that one of the things I struggle with is analysis paralysis. There are so many lesson options here, I freeze on where to go next. Maybe if I know that I need to learn a particular song before a scheduled jam session, that would help with that problem.

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#6

Nothing like a deadline to focus your attention! Same here!

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#7

Lol, Ditto on the deadline thing!

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