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Old 04-17-2020, 07:29 AM   #1
ultraleetj
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Jul 2016
Posts: 36
Default some creative ideas for a more dynamic intervallic jam

so, I have been doing weekly jams and mostly advertising them on my fb page, so all of my local friends and colleagues can join.
Since this is a rather new thing, I have had to explain over and over why realtime audio and playing online together goes from extremely difficult to impossible, in 99% of cases it will be impossible anyway.
Once they get this, we all have a great time. I have prepared some crafted loops and such and its just great. One little issue I do have though, is that when I press home, or w to go to the start of the project after using media explorer to insert a media file or whatever, (cursor won't stay in the same place no matter what I have configured in options) the ninjam metronome sort of stutters a bit, as if it was paused or something... so this makes me think that I will eventually go totally off sync if I keep doing this, so some reassurance or a way to fix this is appreciated.

So now to the bulk of the matter, I have found the following helpful for interesting jams:
1. when jamming over progressions its nice to start to subtly vary the progression and try to evolve it into something new. Many musical cultures sort of have this as well and it works that great on ninjam also.
2. When doing longer musical forms (I think max allowed BPI is 64) its better to halve the tempo and work with that. This means that most faster swing tunes (such as "it don't mean a thing") can be played say, at 120 bpm with a 64 BPI successfully.
3. When doing things that are in other time signatures, like 3/4, its necessary to set a propper BPI (24 for 8 bars for instance) and then CHANGE the time sig in your project as well, if you plan to loop something.
4. This one was the most interesting... if there was a way to do this automagically or something, we could have codas that extend the end of a tune. Take, for example, autumn leaves where the last 4 bars are commonly repeated before finishing the tune over and over... this is called a tag ending, where all players can improvise for a while, as well. Of course, if you are at the front of the jam, or whoever is (a lead instrument, or anyone who has the last melody) they could click or press a button that said tag and have the BPI be automatically voted or changed to 4 bars (or any preconfigured value that will not exceed the current BPI) and by just playing and with the evident metronome change, signal that there is an ending coming up. I did this and it proved to be actually quite successful despite the interval nature of the jam. The only problem was that I had to stop playing to type the BPI vote lol. But this could also be expanded to allow us to change sections of a song for a while and so on.
So, any thoughts? other ideas to give more life and creativity to the current system we have in place?
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