Structural Engineering

Hiya anonymouse,

There are a couple of people who are doing this in a way I reckon. Jed is one... he always come in with a loop of some sort he has put together and that keeps the ideas moving in one direction so his jams are always pretty structured.... till we get a bit silly ... which most of the time. The other I reckon is Andy, he does a similar thing but with his unique Andyness.. which is often great great fun....the helicopter pursuit of Russ was one recent one which still makes me laugh out loud when I think about it. Most of the time we don't bother to get anything organised we just lob onto the server and see what happens...and we all know how fantastic that can be. But, there are other possibilities.

Hey nextday,

I often worry that my severe logorrhea prevents me from communicating effectively... :P What I had meant to convey (in a single sentence!) was:
I would like to try a 30 minute jam once a month using a long BPI and playing a pre-determined standard (such as Waltzing Matilda or On the Sunny Side of the Street etc).

I am particularly interested in this to see if that type of jam can be remixed well. (Damn, does that count as two sentences?)

Oops, while checking the spelling of logorrhea I see that it is a real mental illness... No offense intended to those afflicted...

I am not sure whether we will ever find an audience for what we do, but in terms of the history of the Internet I bet what we have done here becomes recognised as a milestone in the development of music. Ninjam will be seen as the turning point of musical collaboration. Its a shame we tend to take it for granted that we can do this, but I certainly remember when you couldn't. For me to jam with may mates involved a 100km round trip to my mate's shed, and then it was just me and the two brothers to jam with. On Ninjam the whole world comes along to join in, an wow isn't there some talent out there! How I see it is that a core of people who understand each others playing quite well has developed, and if we chose to do it, this could lead to a whole range of new possibilities. I bet for instance in your mind you know how each person of maybe 10 people who came into a jam are going to sound and play. For example if you wanted to create a certain sound I bet you would know who to ask. In terms of jamming I don't think having an audience is the slightest bit important. But we could easily create music that did have an audience simply by agreeing that this was what we wanted to do. Honestly how many times have you come on here and been blown away by what you were hearing?????

I think none of you are actually real people and it's just a sentient computer that's been set up to harvest riffs from the masses. Probably Simon Cowell is behind it.

DD for heavens sake dont tel the masses the truth

Hahahahahaha

I don't know what you're talking about, DirtyDeeds. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. We've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And we want to help you.

lol... but seriously speaking, I do think that riff or sample collection is a very interesting potential use of the ninjam technology. When wearing my System Analyst hat I am intrigued by ways that a large amount of work can be distributed amongst many, loosely organized users (think Wikipedia), and generating an online archive of "sympathetic" samples (categorized by BPM, BPI and chord progression) could have many applications.

Now... to find the time to work on that server-side sequencer I've been dreaming of...

The wikipedia analogy is very cool, imagine we have a song we post, and just like wikipedia anyone can edit it, people could jam over it, say stupid stuff like poo bum s*** and the community would delete it and the song would develop. Wow that's a very cool idea. Everytime a jam was developed over the theme we could even vote on the best version. ohh yeahhhh

I really do feel like we're on the cusp of something here (echoing a sentiment I think others have expressed in this forum as well)... some kind of giant, world-wide, music making machine, the full scope of which isn't apparent yet...

Just a little insight..over the past few weeks we have gone from thinking a twelve bar blues was pretty hard to maintain on ninjam to us doing it pretty easily now. I also saw howard play a frank zappa progression of 52 bars no problem. So its perfectly feasible for us to go beyond the one or two chord vamping we often get stuck on. You could have a song of three parts, work out the number of bars and away we go. If we announced the progression before hand, all start on the one..not always that easy...but yes very possible. And yes it has taken me a while to work this out and a lot of you will laugh..but..bpi is the number of beats per interval...so a 12 bar blues is 48 bpi..get it 12 bars 4 beats per bar....that is 48 bpi... yes thank you i am a genius.. a very slow one...cheers all

Yep, I'd be up for some of this. It's perfectly feasible. Would be nice to intros/outros too. I'm amazed how much we manage to squeeze out of a couple of chords!

And this too, will pass.
Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

Aiight, let's do it! I was going to use a random number generator to pick the hour of the day for the first try, but I think maybe we should go for 23:00 GMT, I believe that's 9AM in Melbourne, midnight in London, 7PM New York and 4PM Los Angeles... equally unappealing for all... (well, maybe not NY).

Unless anyone strenuously objects during the intervening hours, tomorrow I'll set up an event for October 1st/2nd at 23:00 GMT.

i've seen some jap cats playing to larger stuff by lowering the bpm and thinking of an apropiate bpi lenght in terms of measures each click,so you can effectively enlarge the largest available setting for an harmony sequence

Not easy to play a complete piece with breaks, chorus, bridges. But in a controlled chaos we managed to make this piece brilliant! Ah! Ah!
Alone it is good, in some the task it complicates seriously with the gap of the BPI! effect of canon Gregorien!
But finally it is not the worse than a jam where the participants do not know what to play. The tone is always the same, and the playing was right
From another point of view it is unsaleable and difficult to listen to for a perfectioniste.
Dasshing jam edit, listen to that:
Final Count Down
Lose not your time to criticize, we know that it is not the top!
By making turn in buckle just a part that makes it!
Deeply the real-time jams on WEB! 2020? 2030? it there boring of jams in 2 chords !

Best regards
Bilos Strat.ø¤º°*°º¤ø

Yes, I roped nextday into a 48 BPI blues jam the other night and it was more difficult to get it started than I expected. I think the use of a loop or loops (as you did in the Neoclassical event) will probably have to substitute for skill in my case...

All right, I created an event here. I figured we could nominate songs in the comments of the event. Now... what to pick... what to pick...

Something simple to start with so we get everyone on board.

On board, that just made me think straight away of "Were all living on a Yellow Submarine..."
:D Dam that will stick in my head now and I won't be able to get it out. :)