Tag: jamulus

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We recorded our jam again this week since last week’s didn’t take advantage of the our multi-client Jamulus setup to separate our vocal and instrument tracks. I think it sounds better, although, one might be hard pressed to tell the difference unless they are doing the mixing.

Speaking of mixing, I think I need some guidance. This week, I bumped up the bass per request (hopefully not too much), but I’m at a loss on what to do with the vocals. I’m going to ship one of the songs off to a friend with a degree in audio engineering and a ton of experience. After he finishes laughing at my attempts to mix this, perhaps he can give some direction.

Unfortunately, there is more noise in this week’s recording. I think it’s coming from network delays. I’d like to verify that this is the case to understand if there is anything we can do to minimize it.

Here’s a taste of the session. I only flubbed a couple times.

Look Sharp! (Joe Jackson cover) recorded from a Jamulus session on 22 Nov, 2024.

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We recorded the Friday jam this week, very exciting. In comparing a couple of the songs from the last recording, I did notice some improvement. Not bad for a bunch of guys that don’t practice enough. Here’s a select track from that session.

Rock n Roll Ruby (Warren Smith cover) recorded from a Jamulus session on 15 Nov, 2024.

In spite of our effort to separate the instrument and vocal tracks by running multiple Jamulus clients, we ended up with vocals on one of the guitar tracks. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until working on the mix. It was just a setting in Jamulus we’d missed. Lesson learned: Take a minute at the beginning of the session to ensure you’re recording what you think you are.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the recording. There are a spots with garbling and noise from somewhere in the network, which is to be expected. There isn’t much audio engineering here aside the volume levels and some panning. There is some compression and reverb added the vocals. And, I tried to highlight the guitar solos. Early reviews are that there wasn’t enough bass in the mix. I didn’t want it to sound like the bass guy mixed it, perhaps I overcompensated.

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The block party is a summer tradition. Ours was on Saturday. While there was no bouncy castle, a staple of the Brooklyn block party, there were several other festivities. We just hung out on the stoop for a while and enjoyed chatting with the neighbors. We talked about lobbying for some more music programming at our end of the block next year. Maybe even a live show! I was also trying to recruit a couple people for the Friday jam sessions. I didn’t get a firm “yes” from anyone, but they didn’t say no–I’ll continue to work on them…

Speaking of the jams, this week’s wasn’t bad. We hammered through the playlist I sent out earlier in the week. The playlist keeps us on track and I hope that by rotating our growing repertoire through it that we don’t get bored by playing the same things too much or rusty by not playing some songs enough. I’m also loving the two client setup on with Jamulus. Just need to get our guitar/vocalist to do the same.

Bitter & Esters, Brooklyn’s homebrewing center of gravity at 700 Washington Avenue will be closing in October. While I don’t brew often, when I do, the ingredients and supplies come from these guys. They will be missed by many.

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I don’t often get the Sunday Blues. But, this Labor Day evening? Serious Monday Blues. Something about the cooler weather and a premonition that this week was going to be a shit show on several fronts reminded me of the dread I always felt the evening before the first day of school. Though, as with school, this week wasn’t all that bad.

The highlight of the week (it’s good to have low expectations sometimes): I finally figured out how to run two Jamulus clients on my Mac. Hundreds of others have managed to do this without much effort, but it was a challenge for me. We tested the new setup on a Thursday jam–thumbs up all around. There’s a step-by-step guide here: How To Run Multiple Jamulus Clients on a Mac. I wrote it mostly for one of my fellow jam mates; why not put it out there for others?

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Running separate Jamulus clients on a Macintosh is relatively straightforward. In spite of that, I had a hard time getting it all to work, especially the audio routing. The howtos I found were great, but for Windows or included a Digital Audio Workstation in the signal chain. I just needed to send two channels from my audio interface to the Jamulus server separately. After a couple false starts, and one really complicated setup, I landed on a quick and easy setup that works well.

Why would you even want to do this? Great, question! Initially, I want to separate vocals from the instruments while recording. However, it’s great having them separated when just playing. When each instrument is in a separate stream, everyone can better adjust the volume and stereo placement of everything in their personal mix–something you can’t do if vocals and an instrument are combined in one stream.

A step by step guide, complete with screenshots appears below. I hope it saves at least one person some headaches. Enjoy!

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