Online auditioning, jamming, and rehearsing has been a reality for awhile, but how effective is it?  How many musicians have actually rehearsed using this method?  Does it work, and if so, why isn’t everyone doing it?  It’s not like Skype, where you can only hear one audio source at a time.  When you consider all the time constraints of assembling five players together at the same time, burning gas and sitting in traffic to get these five people to rehearsal from five different locations, rehearsing online sure makes sense.  Especially for certain applications, such as when a band is in the early stages of first getting their songs together.  Later, closer to a gig, final rehearsing can be done live.

After doing some research, I came up with a few websites which incorporate different methods of online rehearsing.  What they seem to have in common is the problem of “signal latency”, meaning the timing between different players is apparently not exact, and the further people are from one another, the off timing gets more pronounced.  If all five people are within 25 miles of each other, it should work fine, but not if one guy is 300 miles away.  Here are a few websites where you can learn more about online rehearsing:

www.MusicianLink.com
www.JamKazam.com
www.eJamming.com

I think we can all agree that nothing will ever beat the effectiveness and camaraderie of musicians playing together in the same room.  But many times this is difficult, impractical, or downright impossible.  Since all online functions are constantly improving as time marches on, how much longer will it be before some technical genius solves the problems mentioned in the paragraph above?  Now, if someone could just figure out a way to TELEPORT players to a location to rehearse or better yet, to a gig, THAT’s what I’m waiting for!