a great ninjam
I’ve been using NINJAM for about a year or so now to play with other musicians online. Sometimes the experience is unbelievably excellent. This is a mix of one of those sessions.
Programming note: the first 15 seconds or so are silent.
This is a jam in G minor that I played online with a few other guys August 2, 2008. In the mixed edited version presented here you will hear myself on keyboards (including playing bass for a while at the beginning on my MiniMoog emulation), chazz on guitar, Slickback on drums, and Zen_Fusion on bass with some superb congas toward the beginning. All these guys would be welcome in any band I was playing in.
What I like best here is that the feel of it is always really nice, it doesn’t spend all the time at the top of the dynamic range, and everyone’s listening to each other pretty damn well. We go through a number of distinct feels, but even when we stay in one groove for a while, there’s a lot of variation and interplay. A number of breakdowns add a lot of interest to what would otherwise be a one-chord jam.
chazz does some very interesting playing against the key signature, which adds a lot of tension. Stay tuned for his big solo which he saves for 26:30 in. Some wicked 5lets, great phrasing, and outrageously good guitar tone. By about 29:00 he’s having his proper freakout.
Slickback puts all kinds of variety in without resorting to “fills” in the tired cliche sense. All throughout he’s got subtle things going on that really make this a great pocket to play in.
Zen_Fusion covers the bass part just perfectly for this kind of groove–searching, not repeating, leaving lots of space for everyone else. He shows incredible musicianship through this whole track, supporting everything while playing parts that are interesting and drive changes in the feel of the group continually.
This was a blast to mix–every track sounded damn good before I started. I mainly tried to put people more clearly into the foreground with some level adjustments when it helped. I put a bit of New York compression on the drums, which really put some additional shine on a great performance. All the space echo delay effects on my parts were done live–I have a bunch of controls mapped from the delay to my midi controllerizer, letting me hang clouds of sound out when I like, and then blow them away when I want to move on.
