Let’s discuss some tactics and format. I said “Zoom” (and I do get the sense it may be best for audio quality) but I’m open to alternative technology suggestions.
Sounds like people would like to get together for multiple reasons, and that it may be desirable to keep individual sessions focused on one of those reasons. So that suggests a need for some kind of rotating schedule?
We’ll need hosting/moderation volunteers. Someone for each session to make sure the thing happens on time and stays on topic. and assists with technical difficulties.
Gotta do the day job for a bit this morning, but I’ll come back to this thread with a group calendar link and a spreadsheet for moderation volunteer signups unless someone beats me to it.
i recall that the norns study group managed a regular video meetup via discord. i don’t have any comparison for audio quality, but the persistent existence of a channel allows for scheduling/organizing within the same platform.
I’ve just asked for some help in the norns study group. I probably lack a role or something because I can’t see any channels there. I find discord to be a usability train wreck and generally avoid it but I can make an exception for y’all.
I have a zoom account through my school, and I’d be happy to host the occasional hang session (I do that anyway for an Ableton-focused google group I run that has a number of lines folk already, DM me if you’d like to join that).
Anyway, the zoom audio can be quite decent, including in stereo. There is also a zoom audio interface from Ableton, so it’s pretty easy to play Live sets to the group, if that’s of any interest)…
FWIW hosting an audio share session (i.e. playing tracks) Zoom/Meets/etc. will work fine.
However, these video chat Apps are not ideal for any jam session, as the latency will be too high. A friend of mine and I have had reasonable success using Jamulus. Here’s documentation that was helpful for us.
I ended up using Google Cloud to set up a proxy server as opposed to using my own hardware.
One idea, and I’d be happy to tee this up depending on the schedule, would be to send all the tracks to one person and have them put them all into their DAW and then cue them up and output via Audiomovers. Everyone gets a link and can listen in real-time in high quality. I’ve been using it for remote mixing and it’s awesome. Everyone could listen to the track and then unmute and hop back into a Zoom to discuss. Just an idea.
Just chiming in to say I’d be keen for group listening and feedback. There are settings in Zoom for high quality and stereo audio. I’ve taken music lessons over Zoom with no problem.
Hi folks, thanks for your feedback here and on discord.
Will do some testing this week to make sure the high fidelity audio settings are available to free users of zoom.
The session format that I think folks are wanting is a chance for a group of lines folks to submit a track for the group to listen to, for discussion afterwards. No latency issues with that format!
How often do you think you might want to do this? Monthly? Every two weeks?
Oh, also, I really liked this reply from @wheelersounds about the elements of good critique. How would folks feel about following a bit of structure designed to elicit this type of feedback?
The Liz Lerman process sounds pretty humane to me.
Frequency is an interesting question. I’m way to busy and my life is way to chaotic to commit to anything resembling “often,” if that commitment required some semblance of actually attending on a schedule.
On the other hand, I’d love to know that something was going to happen on a regular basis so I could participate as I could fit it in.
I recognize that part of the value of such groups is the trust built up over time when folks get together rather regularly. So, perhaps there is some use case for having several groups meeting at varying frequencies, or having varying levels of expected commitment/availability.
Or maybe one group would eventually come to trust the folks who can’t be there all the time… Hard to tell.
Well, it’s intentionally vague kind of by definition
I suppose some folks want to get together every other week while for others it could be monthly or even quarterly…
If it’s a big enough group then as often as weekly could work since it’s likely that at least a few people would come to any given session. It kind of makes missing the occasional session not too big of a deal…
Since we don’t know how large the group is I guess we will have to table that discussion.
Here’s another tough question: timing. 10am pacific is 6pm in London. Catches a lot of folks but leaves out Australia and NZ for whom it is 5am and 3am respectively.
10am in Australia makes for 5pm pacific and now it’s 1am in London.
I could imagine hosting every two weeks, once at 10am pacific and use the 5pm time for the other session. That way folks in all time zones have at least one session per month they can catch. And then if we get more moderator volunteers and there’s demand for it, we could add more sessions.
Anybody have day of week preferences? I’m thinking Saturday or Sunday.
Definitely Saturday or Sunday for me, although I can also often do Wednesday evenings US eastern time around 8 pm.
Perhaps we can create a signup sheet (google sheet perhaps) where we could gather info on interested folks and see if there are any patterns that might help sort out times, time zones, preferred days, and potential for hosting.
