NINJAM:
At the suggestion of Second Life blues maestro Komuso Tokugawa, an Australian artist living in Tokyo, I installed the free NINJAM application that allows for realtime jam sessions via the internet. I first installed the stand-alone application, but have found the plug-in version included with the REAPER DAW (another free download) to work much better on my system. I still have some teething problems to resolve (drop-outs and disconnects even on this 8M down 512kbps up ADSL line), but I’m pretty sure the problem is on my end and that the platform works. And even with these problems, it worked well enough for Komuso and I to do a short performance together last night, which he streamed into Second Life live. Komuso played guitar, blues harp and shakuhachi and I was on the windcontroller. In the first track, he was streaming the beat & bass, and in the second the beat & bass came from my side. Here’s what it sounded like:
Read Akihiko Yabu’s review of the performance here. It’s in Japanese, but Google Translate does a semi-OK job of translating it into English.
In the audience was Junivers Stockholm, an SL friend and musician that I’ve jammed with before via Voice in SL. Juni jammed along with our SL stream at his home in Sweden and recorded the result. Unfortunately, his contribution was not audible to Komuso and me, or to the audience in SL. He sent me an mp3 of the recording, however, and I’m presenting it here as a 3 way realtime jam with me in Taiwan, Komuso in Japan, and Juni in Sweden:
Incidentally, the NINJAM software allows for more than two participants – whilst experimenting, I’ve connected to a session with 6 participants, but my drop-out problem seems to become magnified with every additional participant. Whilst my jamming experiment with Juni via Voice in SL proved that it’s definitely a workable option (Juni has much more experience in this area than me), the benefit using NINJAM is that it allows for stereo streams.
BREATHE:
Unrelated, but still squarely on the topic of collaborations, I was contacted by Hip Hop artist Keynote of the Drunken Monkiees. He liked my track “Comfort Zone” off Chill Dynasty and decided to add vocals to it. Though I’d never envisioned for the track to have vocals, I thought the result was really pretty cool! Well, Keynote just got back to me with an updated version – for this one, he’s gone into a studio to rerecord the vocals. Have a listen to “Breathe”:
