[ninjam] Duet - drums and guitar

Share your music, collaborate, and partake in monthly music contests.
Post Reply New Topic
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

Just sharing this one, really. Production issues are secondary to the fun it was playing live. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

http://www.drealm.info/ninjam/20131102- ... es-tea.mp3

Me on drums: AlternateMode TrapKAT triggering ns_kit7 (natural drum kit) Rock Kit, snares on, with some tweaks.
tea on guitar: no idea on details.
ninjam session set to 120bpm, 32bpi. (Effectively we're hearing each other 8 bars apart... tea's recording would differ from mine or a third party's...)
Post processed in Reaper by normalising both tracks (+2.23 dB drums, +10.1dB guitar), adjusting levels by ear very roughly (-6.25dB drums, -7.94dB guitar), rendering to 24 bit wav.
Mastered in audacity, trimming and fading the ends and amplifying back up.

Post

This is great improv. The mix is good. It has certainly retained a great live dynamic.

I think I've got my head around the concept. If I have understood this correctly, you are each playing along with the other guy's part from 8 bars earlier in order to counteract latency. I assume that there is some sort of real-time codec being applied to handle limited bandwidth networks, but you are re-assembling the completed track from a saved original recording from each transmitting machine. How does this scale for larger ensemble use?

Good work :D

Post

Thanks -- tea is really inspiring to jam with.

Regards ninjam: yeah, pretty spot on -- the compression codec is OGG Vorbis at 64Kbps (per mono track), I think; data is streamed to a server then the server streams to each participant, where it gets synchronised to the beats per interval by their client. You also get to do a multi-track recording for later mixing, as here, which is really handy.

Scaling-wise... it mostly reaches chaotic interaction thresholds well before network bandwidth becomes an issue. I've been in rooms with 9 other people and had no network problems. (Handily, your normal domestic internet connection gives you more download bandwidth than upload, which is exactly what's needed.) Organising a vaguely meaningful jam in a group that size of "free spirits" is impossible, though, :lol:.

Obviously, the server needs to be pretty powerful in terms of bandwidth but the two main public sites run multiple rooms of 8 to 10 participants and each participant can have an "unlimited" (except by upload bandwidth) number of channels. You can get quite a few 64Kbps streams down even a 2Mbps low grade DSL connection to a client, so even the network bandwidth side isn't too much of an issue. I doubt the CPU load of OGG Vorbis is that high, either, given the servers are doing nothing much else. (They needn't even decompress/compress the data but I don't remember whether they do for some reason.)

Post

As an example of a larger jam:
http://www.drealm.info/ninjam/20131103- ... lothar.mp3

I had to cut out a few parts as they didn't work. The four guitarists left just about managed to gel by having two on rhythm and two on lead. Volume levels were all over the place and I panned the players for extra separation. You can imagine what happens when more people try to join in something like this... (Most people seem to be guitarists for some reason -- except when you're in a room with just a bass player and then you never see one... just like buses, I guess... :lol:)

Post

There are some very good moments on that second jam. Some of the lead playing was very good. You seem to have more guitarists than Lynyrd Skynyrd :)

Good work :)

Post

Thanks :)

More selections here: http://peter.drealm.info/jamming (or fancy new AJAX/JSON/HTML5 audio player version: http://peter.drealm.info/json )

Post Reply

Return to “Music Cafe”