Jamming in Second Life

Avatar · 12-15-2006, 02:15 PM

I've set up a "jam room" with a Shoutcast server in Second Life. If you're not familiar with this, see secondlife.com - membership is free. Just for fun, I would like to find some good musicians to jam together and I will pipe the result into the room. Any inworld avatar walking in to the room can then hear the jam and communicate with the musician avatars. Each avatar will play a different instrument - I can provide these to you. Ultimately, I will put on some inworld concerts of avatars that jam from different physical locations. Would be great if people who are already able to play well together are willing to try this out. If this sounds like fun to you, go into SecondLife and send an IM to Jazz Glineux.

sp4miz · 12-17-2006, 02:27 PM

I have heard of second life before and have been kind of fascinated by it. What do you do there and yea if it is as good and as popular as they say it is I would love to be able to play there. The audience would be more music lovers rather than just musicians. Can I say promotional opportunities? Sure, let us know more about it!

Avatar · 12-17-2006, 05:03 PM

Second Life offers lots of opportunities for musicians, and some are becoming well known by giving concerts there that other avatars attend and even make money by tips and providing links to their CDs on a website. Casinos there advertise and pay for live bands. It's pretty weird, but worth checking out by going to secondlife.com and reading the magazine articles that have been published. Live concerts are very popular. You can join for free and walk around and check it out - look under events and search for live music. I would be happy to help individuals there understand the world of SL - just send a message to Jazz Glineux by sending an IM to this name when you join SL.
My interest is in the concept of having multiple avatars play in a band together from multiple locations (using Ninjam) - I would log into the Ninjam server and then pipe the jam into the house I bought there (a barn for practicing) using my shoutcast server. I can provide interested musicians instruments that are scripted to look like they are being played (drums, guitar, keyboard, bass). Eventually, I could arrange for a concert performance in one of the many venues there. SL is full of creative people doing things like this for no other reason than that it's cool and weird.....

Rivet · 12-20-2006, 10:14 AM

Question. I joined, but the program lags on my computer for some reason. Would this affect the playing of the music since it is technically done outside the program?

Avatar · 12-20-2006, 12:44 PM

Second Life does require a fairly good gaming system with a modern graphics card and a good broadband connection to work well. The sound stream is independent, however and should work fine. A landowner or music club sets up to point to a url address which is usually a shoutcast server. There are howto instructions about this in secondlife help. If you have an interest as a solo musician there, search for live music - old salt's pub is one place, there's auditions on Mondays. Send me a message here or in sl (Jazz Glineux) if u want to test out the audio. It may be difficult to run sl on your pc and run a lot of other things, but may work ok with just ninjam. Anwyay, these are things that would be interesting to test. I can send interested people a shoutcast login for testing purposes or if there's a jam scheduled I can connect in and test sending it in, it's not really necessary to join and have an avatar there to do this, but i'm curious to see how well it can work with multiple avatars operating the instruments.

sp4miz · 12-20-2006, 09:51 PM

Avatar--all the above: yea set me up so that I can see how the whole process works. Contact me here through the forums. I bet that there is a very good potential to market your music to the masses there in SL. Really, a potential sea of virtual fans. Thanks!

synthany · 12-23-2006, 04:12 PM

Avatar:

I'm interested in participating in a test team for jamming in Second Life, and learning more about what you have described.

You could use this forum's private messages function for specific people like sp4miz and me and others.

thanks for posting this - it sounds cool.

Astrin · 12-26-2006, 08:52 PM

Hiya, Jazz, I'd like to get in on some in-world NinJams, but there is no Jazz Glineux in Search in SL. Give me a holler, Astrin Few. I've been playing live in SL for ages and have done some Shoutcast relay/looping stuff, but want to have fun with NinJam. I'm sure Flaming Moe will be into it when he gets back from his cruise gig. I did some today with Julian Vesta on my own NinJam server. I've been working with my son, a drummer, to get him to stay on a metronome beat so a NinJam can have real drums instead of the metronome for the rest of the players.

BlueTom · 12-30-2006, 05:55 PM

Hi,
I tried these things with AVATAR (Jazz Glineux) the last days.
It seems to be working and is funny to. Nice to see
animated people that were dancing to your music.

Avatar · 12-30-2006, 07:56 PM

We've tested with BlueTom's Ninjam server and all is working well - many SL residents like to come and hang out to hear the jams - thanks BlueTom.
It is not necessary to be in SL to jam - in fact the audio that is listened to by avatars in the room is delayed by about 30secs, so the music control button should be set to off if u are there. There's a lot of info I need to provide to make the process more understandable - am working on it. For now, I just need to log into a Ninjam server and the rest is taken care of - anyone going into the jam room will then hear the audio. The address in SL of the room is:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Achado/44/105/89
If you put this in your web browser u can go there, if not a member u can sign up for free.
I will need volunteers to have ninjam servers available - if i know in advance when there is a jam going on I can then join the jam as a listener and the rest is taken care of. Eventually I would like to have others be able to do this as well and to figure a way to schedule the jams as only one at a time can go into the room. In SL, search for a group called Jammers, u can then join it and notices will eventually go out with more info.
More to follow....

Komuso · 01-01-2007, 08:04 AM

Hi,
Sounds like fun.
I do a lot of SL music performances and have done a few one-way metajams [hear one at the start of http://komusotokugawa.blip.tv/file/121200/ ]

I'll check out the slurl and group in world.
Sounds like fun...but can you turn off the metronome sound?
It's driving me batty listening to a jam at the moment.

IM me anytime -> komuso tokugawa in sl

NIGHTCHILD · 01-02-2007, 09:22 AM

wow i tried 2nd life what a waste of an hour why not just play sims online

Avatar · 01-02-2007, 10:25 AM

For me, NightChild, the difference between SL and things like the Sims is that in SL every character there has a live human being behind them. Ive met some very creative and interesting people there and have carried some of these relationships over to real life. SL can be a way for musicians to be listened to and to meet other musicians. For me, it's really just another communications vehicle with an interesting visual aspect.
It's certainly true that there's plenty of stupid and boring aspects to SL and "sex" seems to be a big part of the draw. Just like real life. Personally, I just like the idea of more live music there - lots of people in SL like to listen to music and musicians like to be listened to so from this viewpoint it's just another way to connect.

sp4miz · 01-02-2007, 06:45 PM

I've been on SL now for about a week and it's pretty unique. It kind of feels like that Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come" where that movie was like Heaven and people could fly. Anyways SL isn't Heaven but we can step that virtual reality a notch up further with our sweet sounds thru Ninjam. I've seen some familiar "faces" in their like Neimad, Blue Tom, and Avatar. I hope to see more of you there soon epecially around the campfires at The Cave! :P

Richie · 01-05-2007, 08:10 AM

hi all last week some time Bluetom directed a few of us to this thread since then i have been in SL pretty much consistantley,wow what a great program the depth of the world is just unbeleavable,and the possibilities are endless,got round to meeeting up with blue in the jam room today and he gave me a demo of how it all goes down,im totaly in awe of this unique program and every body should check it out,for me its perfect beacuse i often like to listen to you guys doin your thing but take up bandwidth in the servers if im not playing.cant wait to see a load of you guys in game jamming out with all your instruments. im in the jammers group as ibanez(funny cause blue tom has a steve vai ibanez in game)only thing is that i still have latency issues with ninjam so most of the time ill just be spectating but have been telling a lot of people about the jam room i imagine at some point youll be doing gigs and have a real big crowd listeining should be intresting seeing how this will develop,but any ways avatar your the man for telling us about this awesome second life and thx to blue tom for helping me out once again every body should check it out,now im off to go see my SL girl freind im taking her to the beach ))))

AndyMc · 01-05-2007, 09:38 AM

Haha I got a auto email telling me off for leaving a red car in the room, but it was my first time.
I'm currently fitting my little red car with a homing device so I don't lose it again.

Cya in there soon as I get some free time.

Elias · 01-07-2007, 07:09 PM

hmm whats wrong with me that I dont like to me listened too? Some sort of defect I assume, I like playing enough.

Avatar · 01-08-2007, 10:55 AM

Nice, Elias, that you like to play music for it's own sake - I 'spose I shouldn't presume to speak for all musicians. Bit silly of me to respond to your sarcasm, is not a chat board, but anyway there's probably nothing that everybody agrees on...

tbfx · 01-08-2007, 11:03 AM

Hey Second Life just released their crazy source code.

If "someone" is real clever we could make it so we
could broadcast to our evil army of avatars without
ever logging in now!

In any case the other problem of actually having avatars
animate to a given Ninjam track is solvable now.

Here is the press release
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/0...he-inevitable/

sp4miz · 01-12-2007, 02:50 PM

Avatar,

Can you post here in the forums (as well as in SL) the times when there will be a jam session. Right now I can't spread the word fast enough in SL to check out us Jammers. I just don't have the times and schedules to doll out. Thnx in advance.

Avatar · 01-12-2007, 07:54 PM

Right now, there really isn't a schedule posted here or in sl. If I notice there's a jam going on, I just send a message to the group in SL. Bluetom or I just need to know when to connect to a ninjam server, would be nice if someone else can do this so it's not dependent on us. It's kinda up to when people want to play and on what server, if someone wants to figure out how to organize this, would be great, I'm not good at that sorta thing....

BlueTom · 03-12-2007, 02:56 PM

Hi guys,
here are some results of our work at Secondlife.com .
The music is done live via ninjam on a private server.
All time the sims at our gigs were full. Think there is
much interest by the people there experiencing such things.
At the moment there is no other band doin that. To have a
listen, here a to vids of our last gigs there.

http://www.bostonsl.com/VLB/latin/VLBlatin10313.html

http://www.bostonsl.com/VLB/makemyday/VLBmakemyday.html

LeftyF · 03-13-2007, 11:12 AM

Wow, this is really cool. How did you get the guitars on your avatars, get them to play, etc? I tested Second Life a bit at work for our brand development folks as they were convinced this would be a good place to hold meetings with our 3rd party developers (don't think so!), but I think you've showed that it's a viable live music venue - really cool idea! Count me in for sure :-)

Thanks in advance for more info

Lefters