Hi JamKazammers –
Read on for the latest software updates, blog posts, upcoming hosted online sessions, recordings/broadcasts, JamTracks catalog updates, and more.
Office Hours
We continue to offer two weekly office hours sessions for anyone who needs help.
- JamKazam Session Office Hours (Every Tuesday 7-8pm US Central Time)
If you have our app installed and your gear set up, you can join this JamKazam session as a safe space with a JamKazam support team member to experience and learn how to play in online sessions, or to ask questions about particular features or issues you’re having. To find this session, start the JamKazam app, click the Find Session tile, then click the Open Jams tile, and look for the session called “JamKazam Office Hours”, and click the Join icon on this session. - Zoom Office Hours (Every Wednesday 11am-12pm US Central Time)
If you haven’t set up your gear yet and need help getting started, you can join this Zoom meeting room to ask a JamKazam support team member any questions you have. Don’t be shy, we’re here to help! To join the Zoom, click this link on any Wednesday at the time above.
New Features & Fixes
- New Session Broadcast Feature – More big news! We have completed work to leverage our new integration with OBS Studio to release a new feature that lets you live broadcast the audio and video of your JamKazam sessions through popular broadcast platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and more. Learn how to use this new feature in our help article Broadcasting Your Sessions. You can even have a friend of the band control your video to cut between multiple layouts of the full band and individual performers while you’re playing to bring more visual interest and energy to your broadcasts.
- Setting Your Preferred Browser – We’ve fixed a bug that was sometimes causing your preferred browser (for JamKazam integration) to revert to something else. When this happened, it could disrupt a number of features and stop them from working properly, like starting up video in your session, or downloading music notation files shared in sessions. In addition, it’s worth noting that our new video recording and live broadcasting features require Chrome – at least for now – as Safari integration constraints prevent us from making Safari work smoothly with these features. We recommend checking what your preferred JamKazam browser is set to, and updating it to Chrome (or to whatever browser you prefer). Please read our short help article with instructions on how to do this.
Calling All Bands – Let Us Live Broadcast You!
As mentioned above, we’ve just released our new live broadcasting feature for JamKazam sessions. If you have a band or more informal group that rehearses and plays on JamKazam, we would love to live broadcast a performance by your band, and promote it both to the JamKazam community and more broadly across our social channels. We can handle the broadcast for you, so that you just show up and play like usual. Or you can broadcast yourselves, and we can simply promote it. Either way is great! We’ve done this before, with good success. Here’s a link to an online music festival we hosted using the first version of our broadcasting features: JamKazam Music Festival. For now, we’re planning to host broadcasts of individual groups, but we may do a festival again in the future. You can be anywhere from awesome to amateurish – it’s all good! We’ve found people really love to see bands playing live like this. Send us an email at support@jamkazam.com, and we can chat with you about getting you ready to roll!
Free JamTracks + Video Mashup
We got a good response to our first free JamTrack offer, so we’re running it back! Send us an email at support@jamkazam.com and ask for the JamTrack for the song “Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac. We’ll give this JamTrack free to the first 25 JamKazammers who request it. In exchange, we ask that you to learn the song, record yourself playing or singing along with the song using our new video recording feature, and get us a copy of the video (via email, Dropbox, whatever works) in the 2 weeks after you get the JamTrack. We’ll edit up some fun mashup videos and share them back here with the community and through our social media channels.
Latest From The Blog
Check out our latest blog post: Minimizing Latency in Online Music Performance. Read Part 7 of 10 in our series of articles on latency, in which we discuss the key things you can do to minimize your latency in online music performance sessions.
Calendar of Hosted Sessions
We have the following hosted session events planned for the next couple weeks. Click a link below for more information. If you want a session for a particular artist or genre you don’t see listed, drop us a note at support@jamkazam.com.
If you can’t access the event links below on Facebook, here’s how to find and join these sessions. Open the JamKazam app at the start date/time of the session you want to join. Click on Find Session on the app home page, then click on Open Jams. You’ll see a list of currently active public/open sessions, and you should see the name of the event listed among our sessions – e.g. “Blues Session” or whichever one you’re interested in. Click the Join icon next to that session.
US Hosted Sessions
- Country Session – Tuesday, August 26 at 2pm CT
- Blues Session – Wednesday, August 27 at 7pm CT
- Oldies (50s/60s/70s Music) Session – Thursday, August 28 at 2pm CT
- The Realm Free Improv Session – Saturday, August 30 at 5pm CT
- Bluegrass Session – Sunday, August 31 at 2pm CT
- Country Session – Tuesday, September 2 at 2pm CT
- Pearl Jam/AIC/STP/Nirvana Session – Tuesday, September 2 at 6pm CT
- Metal & Hard Rock Session – Wednesday, September 3 at 7pm CT
- Oldies (50s/60s/70s Music) Session – Thursday, September 4 at 2pm CT
- Eagles Session – Thursday, September 4 at 7pm CT
- West Coast Jazz Session – Thursday, September 4 at 6pm PT
- The Realm Free Improv Session – Saturday, September 6 at 5pm CT
- Bluegrass Session – Sunday, September 7 at 2pm CT
EU Hosted Sessions
- EU Jazz Session – Tuesday, August 26 at 8pm (UTC+01)
If you’d like to host a session for a specific genre or artist or playlist, please email us at support@jamkazam.com, and we’ll work with you on it!
Past Session Recordings & Live Broadcasts
Following are some recording excerpts from hosted and private sessions, as well as JamKazam recordings and live broadcasts made by members of the community. Come to a session to join the fun!
Psychedelic freeform jam by Jer, Der & Ber, recorded using our new session video recording feature (full length session recording here).
If you’d like to send us a recording or live broadcast of a JamKazam performance that we can share with the community, please send us an email at support@jamkazam.com with a link to your recording/broadcast.
JamTracks Catalog
We have added new songs to our JamTracks catalog. Learn about our JamTracks to see how you can play along with your favorite artists and songs. Below is a list of artists with total songs available per artist, and how many of these are new to the catalog. Click an artist link to preview the JamTracks available for that artist
- Arlo Guthrie – 4 total (4 new)
- Berlin – 4 new (4 total)
- Björk – 4 new (4 total)
- Brett Eldredge – 5 new (5 total)
- Bruno Mars – 11 new (4 total)
- Bryan Adams – 9 new (5 total)
- Collective Soul – 4 new (4 total)
- Dermot Kennedy – 6 new (6 total)
- Franz Ferdinand – 4 new (3 total)
- Galantis – 5 new (5 total)
- Gary Clark Jr. – 3 new (3 total)
- Greta Van Fleet – 5 new (5 total)
- Harry Nilsson – 3 new (2 total)
- J. Cole – 8 new (8 total)
- Jill Scott – 5 new (3 total)
- Jimmy Buffett – 4 new (2 total)
- Josh Turner – 8 new (5 total)
- k.d. lang – 2 new (2 total)
- Lenny Kravitz – 6 new (2 total)
- Marcus King – 3 new (3 total)
- Meghan Trainor – 8 new (5 total)
- Pantera – 5 new (3 total)
- Ratt – 7 new (7 total)
- Steve Miller Band – 10 new (3 total)
Kudos
I enjoy JamKazam, but the benefit is not just my enjoyment. It is that it has made me a better musician. In the past couple of years I have spent thousands of hours playing music I don’t know with people I’ll never meet, and because of that, my ear is better and I can sit in on sessions out in the real world where I don’t even need to know the song they’re playing in the beginning to be able to contribute to it meaningfully and quickly.
– Rick B.
If you have kudos or a story to share, please send us an email at support@jamkazam.com. And as always, thanks for being part of the JamKazam community.
Best Regards,
Team JamKazam