Jam sessions / online co-operation

PS I bet someone says "Why not form a Prog Archives band and compose stuff over the internet ?"

Oh nooooooooooooooooooo. ;-)

I prefer doing jam sessions in a rehearsal studio, a garage or a room rather than doing that online: I find it easier to go to a place with your material (unless you're a drummer, a keyboard player or even a double-bass player) than to register to any online live service (and facing the hazards of disconnections, lags or any other problem of the same type).

About online co-operations, it can work... proven the other collaborators are not too occupied, lazy or uncompetent to send the files to each other. I've seen some musicians friends of mine waiting months for another musician to send their parts... on 1 track, while the band was working on a whole album...

Maybe the shy word has too many possible meanings. If Davesax plays a couple of notes like Charlie Parker before saying  "Let's have a jam together" it will feel intimidating to many. But if he tries several fun electronic sounds and asks to just hold a note for a second because he wants to try and see how it sounds like with another instrument (avoiding Charlie parker solos), very few will want to leave, at least within the next five minutes...

I improvise a lot, rarely playing the same thing twice. I'm actually pretty good, but, being the amateur I am, I only play by myself in my bedroom. I'm not used to playing with anyone else. I need to work on that, but I can't find anyone with talent who isn't too busy (yes, I do bathe regularly). I've actually thought of taking lessons, not because I need lessons, but so I'd have someone to jam with. As things are I do a lot with parallel lines extending out of spluffers, each with their own effects. That way I can have several parts coming out in real time. It takes a lot of fiddling to get a nice arrangement of devices that gives you an illusion of a band while preserving enough floor space to stand in. A common problem is losing signal from devices getting out of phase with each other. I have a handful of loopers, and they're nice to jam over, but it's a bitch getting them to start and stop at the right time. I have a few words for whoever thought of making them stop with a double tap! It's also hard to compose complicated arrangements with loopers due to the fixed length of the loops.

As encouragement for online collaboration, I can now share my experience. yes, there is hope. Since 1.5 year I have been in another project with keys/midi (main composer) and drummer, and along the way I found singer and bass player after searching internet like a maniac (bass player in Nepal...). of course time passes but finally we have put together our first song with all contributions, and made it public. And it is really awesome to hear everyone's contribution raises the quality and arrangement of the song. We have now 5-6 more songs close to final, and about 10 to work on by main composer.

https://soundcloud.com/hallofmountains/frozen
or
https://youtu.be/l4qw3N7RVV8

It's even worse for weirdo musicians like myself. 

If you've heard some of my stuff, well, I tend to think "and now a solo in a Spanish Gypsy scale of G" or "let's have some doumbeks in here" - and you tend to get "let's not, Dave", looks. ;-))

The problem is that it's difficult enough to meet decent musicians, but even more difficult to meet decent musicians who think along your lines. 

Then, inevitably, someone says let's do a gig, let's all be famous, let's make some money, and I'm just too old for all that. I'd just like to play good music with other like minded weird people. ;-)

Also, I think that one problem is that if you like prog rock, you tend to have very high musical standards. You get a vocalist. They're *slightly* flat. The drummer is *slightly* out of time. Someone insists on having a boring bit in. It all gets very tiresome very quickly - unless you all think along the same lines. 

Edited by Davesax1965 - May 16 2017 at 06:22

My wife said to me "The Treacle Tap in Macclesfield (it's a pub) are having a two weekly acoustic jam on Sundays, why not go down there with a sax ? "

And the problem is...... because it'd be dreadful. You'd have a number of amateurs who just play tab. It'd all be in keys difficult to play on sax - E / guitar puts you in F# on a tenor or C# on an alto and the chances of getting a tab player to transpose are nil. There would be absolutely no creativity, just repetition. 

That's what most musicians have become nowadays. 30 years ago, the whole idea was to become a proper improvising / composing musician, and that's what you aimed to be. You weren't really seen as a proper musician otherwise.