online band practice

[rmbaylin]

We've tried using Reaper's Ninjam plugin for online practices when our bassist cant make it. It works... but kinda.... since it delays the sent stream by an 'interval' (say 16 beats), the bassist is off by 4 measures.

It works once he's gets on time with us, but any changes to say a chorus, he's behind us. He finishes 4 measures after we are done.

Anyone have any alternatives that work better?
If you use Reaper/Ninjam , any suggestions for using or configuring ninjam?

I understand there is going to be latency just due to network latency, etc.

R

 

[knoll]

IMHO there's only way to do it. It's not perfect at all but at least you can kind of practice/play together.

- You should have recordings or click tracks of your songs and the bass player should be able to play the songs "on his own" while listening to those tracks.
- The bass player (or actually the recordings or click tracks) has to be the master (clock) and the rest of the band members are slaves. This can be difficult of course because many times the drummer is the master (clock) in normal live situations.
- Setup things so that you can speak to each other between songs but once you start playing make it so that bass player only hears the recordings or click tracks and rest of the band only hears what the bass player plays (and maybe also a bit of the recordings or click tracks mixed in if it's hard to keep in time otherwise). The bass player doesn't/cannot hear what rest of the band plays (that's the down side of this approach).

So the bass player kind of plays alone, with the recordings or click tracks, but the rest of the band kind of gets the full experience of playing together.

If there are better solutions please share.

 

[rmbaylin]

We're going to try EJamming as an alternative. It was real crap when I tried the 1.0 version a while back, but perhaps the new 3.0 is usable.

I think there will always be some issues with some latency, but if we can work around it we will.

Ninjam has some other modes which we may experiment with too.

Will let you know.