Friday, January 09, 2004

Musical Web Jam over the Internet

Web-jam - over the holiday break I've had a bit of time to enjoy myself, time with family, and even time to practice (I love to practice, really!). Over the holiday (December 27, 2003) I was thinking how cool it would be to jam with friends or other kindred spirits on-line. The trouble with that, besides time zone, stylistic, and language logistics, is that musical "jams" are often fleeting. When playing or rehearsing in person we have the liberty of eye contact, dialog, etc. So although in-person is the way to go, the mere idea of being able to play with musicians around the world is enticing.

Undaunted, I found a place to Web Jam! I navigated to The Web Jam site (a German site with parts in English) and dowloaded the backing track, got out my flugelhorn, loaded up SONAR 2, and began the process of jamming along.

I emailed a link to my MP3 file (it was about 8 mb) and the result, after some very nice mixing by the "Web Jam Master," was this groovy little Web Jam Mix with Rob's Flugelhorn!

I really liked the backing track chord changes - they were challenging to play over and that made it fun too. I'd like to produce some play along tracks like this too and host some of my own web jams or whatever I end up calling them. Meanwhile, I'll look foward to the next Web Jam offering to hear how the tune evolves.

Rob Birdwell

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