Yeah, I had a group of buddies who were phenomenal musicians that jammed together every week to the point we could read very subtle cues in play style and body language (now sadly scattered to the winds), but even after years of playing together, only 1 in 2 or 3 would be something you’d want to listen to the whole thing after. But most of them would have moments of brilliance.
With jamming, you have to look at it like a baseball season. You’re going to win some and lose some, and losing some is okay, because you’re going to play a lot and keep coming out even if you have a bad one once in a while. And it’s a team sport. You can’t expect greatness the first time playing together without knowing how you all fit and knowing what roles to play.
I rented a bandroom, we meet once a week (since mqybe 1.5 years). My tipps: talk about frquency masking, give clear roles.
We aim for 72 Bar loops. 64 Bars where intensity increases, 8 Bar pause.
Toms and Congas, play where the synth hits also, if you have digital mixer, even do some EQ for specific inputs. (Kill Ultra Lows on Kick and Bass, Percussion.) Label all your Inputs. Take turns who should play with FX.
I found 64 bars a bit more easy as it gives each player a 2 min window to play out.
Dont change your setup to frequently. Mapped midi controllers are essential. Overly complex synth are not optimal. Make presets beforehand. Use macros.
I love this thread!
I agree with most with what has been written here so far, and would like to stress the importance of good monitoring.
Headphones for everyone!
Also, when jamming with folks with non-electronic instruments, try to be very well prepared. Their tolerance for waiting for you to get set up might be lower than synth friends. So prepare your sounds already before the meet!
jamming with less experienced friends is a fun way to loosen up on rules and boundaries. ive been having semiregular sessions with a friend who has a fairly avant garde approach to music and its been really fun seeing him “break” typically held rules and finding ways to compliment his groundwork. its almost like he keeps giving me weird puzzles to solve throughout the jam
Absolutely agree - tiny size, loads of features for sync via midi or pulse and can adapt to a load of different situations.
Can sync pocket operators (or anything that takes a sync pulse eg volcas) from chosen ports whilst also syncing midi clock out of other ports (this is why I got it).
… or you keep the amount of gear that needs to be MIDI/clock synced to an absolute minimum. In my experience, in these jam situations it’s often better if you keep things like synths, FX pedals unsynced and use tap tempo, just play over the drums etc. Gives it a more natural feel and is less prone to errors. As long as there are 1-2 leading boxes (drum machines most likely) that signal when something starts and ends and what the tempo is. Depending on how you’re jamming, sequencing everything correctly might be futile anyways and you’ll spend hours fixing problems instead of making music. But of course, it all depends on what you’re trying to do.
This may sound so obvious as to be silly, but it’s important to set up basic expectations for what you’re actually trying to accomplish with your jam.
This came up a while back when I was jamming with a friend of mine who’s into modular—don’t worry this won’t become just an excuse to rag on modular and its adherents.
When we first started jamming, it was a mess and nothing gelled.
So I started by asking what I thought were some pretty basic questions—what key are we in? What kind of BPM? What kind of sounds can you make on that thing?
What I quickly learned was that my friend wasn’t especially concerned with the things I think about constantly, like harmony, counterpoint, and so on. He was more into a kind of musique-concrete approach.
Once we realized that we were coming from two totally different places, it got much easier for us to figure out our roles—I’d provide the backing and foundation, and he could go wild because I was giving him a platform. But it meant I had to remember to take a back seat and not get too weird myself (without telling him first, “ok now I’m gonna take 8 bars and mangle some stuff.”)
So, yeah, I don’t think you have to say “I’m the drums, you’re the bass” or whatever. But it helps to know where each other’s toes are so not to step on them, and it helps to know what your friends actually want to, like, do with the time.
Thought I’d report back, how it went during our first jam.
First of all thanks for the great tips in this topic, I actually kept quite a lot of them in mind. For example: giving everyone a specific role, managing expectations upfront (although the other two had few actual experience with making electronic music, so they were happy with virtually anything), talking about the kind of music we wanted to try (4x4 was really the easiest to begin with), giving each other the space to actually hear what everyone is doing, syncing stuff (works best with a Samples and A4 in the game), record everything and keep it simple with one device pp. Oh: and homemade pizza!
Also lots of stuff I did not think about: one of us is a skilled violin player, but it was not easy to record that and bring it into the mix in a meaningful way. With a simple mixer that sends a usb stereo mix to Ableton to record, it is also not easy to manage levels. And I forgot that my buffer size in Live was set really low, so the recording is full of crackles.
The next time maybe it is a good idea to introduce individual headphones, so everyone can do his own gain staging and finetuning on the mixer? One downside from that setup is that you lose the fun of listening together and filling the room with noise.
Here are a couple of snippets. As I said: the recording was pretty lousy, with wrong buffer size, audio coming in too low in Live (so had to boost it really extreme) and no proper gain staging or mixing. But man, fun it was. Already planned a new date soon with the three of us.
It is the best compromise to have everyone fine-tune their own mix rather than to impose a single master mix on everyone. It will also be healthier for the ears.
Hey, so cool you did it and had fun! It’s been a while since I had an “anything goes” jam, but there’s few things that are more fun.
About the mix: I’d personally say it’s enough as long as it sounds good enough for you in the room to have a good time. At least if your intention is to just have fun, come up with some nice ideas and have a recording of that so you could return to it later or just listen and be proud of the cool shit you made. Having individual headphones, monitors etc. will make things harder to setup and get you into a different zone.
I think you’re right. Just go with the flow the next couple of times and keep it simple. I like the idea to make better recordings to muck about with it afterwards, but maybe later.
