Features & Benefits
Musicians can enjoy four major features of the new JamKazam service, as described below. Also, several Tutorial Videos are available to see how various features work in more detail.
FEATURE: Real-Time Online Sessions
Musicians can create either public or private sessions, or can find and join other musicians’ public sessions, and can play music together in real time in these sessions from different locations over the Internet as if they are sitting in the same room.
BENEFITS:
- Musicians today often spend more time packing, transporting, and setting up and tearing down their gear than they spend actually playing together. With JamKazam, a musician can set up and be ready to play with others in 5 minutes without leaving home.
- Musicians today often struggle to find a place to play together. Apartments and condos won’t work due to noise and space problems. And musicians in homes often have families and children, which makes weeknights impossible again due to noise issues. With JamKazam, musicians can play together from each of their homes, and because JamKazam digitizes and mixes the audio together into the musicians’ headphones, the level of audio disturbance in each musician’s home can be very low to even silent. For example, keyboards and bass guitars can plug straight into an audio interface, and are effectively silent in the musician’s home, and electric guitar players can either plug straight in, or can run their amp at or below the volume of an acoustic guitar, and can mic the amp and adjust the input gain on the audio interface to make the electric guitar as loud as they want it to be in the master mix digitally. Of course, the volume of acoustic instruments like vocals, wind instruments, and drums will be unchanged. But only one home will have to deal with the volume of the drums, and even in this instance, electronic drum kits can be used, again delivering an effectively silent in-home acoustic experience.
- Musicians today can effectively play only with other musicians in very close geographic proximity – i.e. in the same town, or the same general area of a larger metropolitan area. Often musicians have friends and colleagues who are too far away to allow for creative collaboration. With JamKazam, musicians can play with other musicians in a far greater geographic area, allowing for collaboration with other musicians who are hundreds of miles away.
FEATURE: Session Recording
Musicians can record performances during their real-time, remote sessions. Recordings capture both the composite mix of all performers, as well as each of the individual instrumental and vocal performances at the track level. Musicians can easily share the recording mixes with friends, family and fans via Facebook, Twitter, and email, and they can also open and play back the track-level. In addition, the JamKazam service automatically creates a “mastered” version of recordings using the high-quality tracks captured by the musicians’ audio interfaces prior to encoding and streaming, so mastered recordings are comparable in quality to what can be produced in home studios.
BENEFITS:
- Musicians can easily share recordings of their online performances with family, friends, and family.
- Musicians can open recordings and play along with the recorded tracks, effectively playing with their bandmates or musical collaborators even when those musicians are unavailable. This allows for a variety of practice, experimentation, and creativity difficult to achieve today.
- Musicians can create recordings comparable in quality to what can be achieved in a home studio, without even being in the same place, and can do so in real-time rather than recording, uploading and mixing tracks asynchronously as happens today. These mastered tracks can be exported into popular DAW software applications for further editing.
FEATURE: Session Broadcasts
In addition to recording sessions, musicians can live broadcast their sessions so that family, friends and fans can tune in and listen to these live performances from any location using a computer, tablet or smartphone. Like recordings, live sessions can easily be shared via Facebook, Twitter, or email.
BENEFITS:
- Today sessions are effectively private, held in musicians’ homes and open only to the musicians themselves. With JamKazam, musicians can open practice sessions up to others. For example, they can have other musician friends listen in to provide suggestions and constructive criticisms on the musical performances. Or they can allow fans into the “inner circle” to reward and bind super fans closer to the group, providing a level of access that has been impossible.
- With JamKazam, bands and musicians can also effectively use JamKazam to live broadcast more polished concert performances, with very high quality performance audio streamed live to fans’ computers, tablets, and smartphones, either with the band members in different locations, or with the band playing together in one location.
FEATURE: Social Networking
Finally, musicians can use JamKazam to find other musicians in their area, check out their skills, styles, and listen to their performances, and connect to play together online and/or offline.
BENEFITS:
Everyone who plays music knows that it’s far more fun to play with others than to play alone. But many musicians – especially amateur musicians – are not in bands and don’t have established networks of musician friends to play with, simply because of the time and logistical challenges of playing with others, as described earlier. With JamKazam, musicians can easily find other musicians in their area who want to play together online, and who have complementary instruments, skill levels, and musical interests. And they can easily try playing with others without the risk or investment of time to meet in person.