It’s bad enough that the Corona virus is closing clubs, and canceling concerts, festivals and events, but what about just plain old rehearsing?  A couple years ago we sent a newsletter discussing online jamming, but right now this option seems more like a real possibility.

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

There are 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 perfectly exact, and the further people are from one another, the timing lag gets more pronounced.  If all five people are within 25 miles of each other, it should work fine, but apparently not if one guy is 200 miles away.  Just Google “online band rehearsal” to search for web sites and software options.

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, especially now with the Corona situation.  Since all online functions are constantly improving as time marches on, how much longer will it be before some tech genius solves the problem 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!