Skip to main content

Your first jam

NINJAM does something unusual, and if you do not know what it is you will conclude the plugin is broken. So: this page, before anything else.

The interval​

Time is divided into intervals. An interval is BPI beats long -- Beats Per Interval -- at the server's BPM. A typical room is 16 BPI at 120 BPM, so an interval is eight seconds.

Every client records one complete interval of your playing, compresses it, uploads it, and everyone else plays it back during the following interval.

        interval 1        interval 2        interval 3
you:   [ you play A ]    [ you play B ]    [ you play C ]
them:  [   silence   ]   [ you hear A ]    [ you hear B ]

So:

  • You hear yourself live. Local audio is never delayed.
  • You hear everyone else exactly one interval late.
  • Everyone else hears you one interval late, in exactly the same way.

Why this is good, actually​

It sounds like a fatal flaw and it is the entire point.

Real-time jamming over the internet is impossible. Physics puts a floor under the latency, and 40 ms is already enough to make a band fall apart. NINJAM does not fight that. It makes the delay so long that it stops being latency and becomes form.

What you get is a rolling call-and-response: everyone plays over the bar that everybody else just played. A loop builds; you answer it; your answer becomes part of the loop other people answer. It is a genuinely different way to play with people, and once it clicks it is hard to stop.

That is what the name means. An antiphon is a response sung to the phrase that just finished.

How to actually play in it​

The shift that makes it work is giving up on reacting. You are not playing with what you hear; you are playing to it, for the people who will hear you next interval.

  • Lay something down and let it come back. The first couple of intervals are you talking to an empty room. Play something worth answering.
  • Think in whole intervals. A phrase that starts halfway through an interval arrives halfway through somebody else's. Land on the boundary.
  • Listen to the loop, not the moment. What you hear is a complete, finished bar from every other player. Treat it as a backing track that changes every interval.
  • Do not chase the click. The metronome is your grid, and it is the same grid everyone else is on.

What follows from the interval​

  • The first interval is silent. Nothing has arrived yet. Normal.
  • A quiet interval may not arrive at all. The audio codec only emits data every few kilobytes, so near-silence can produce nothing to send. If someone is barely playing, they may simply not appear that interval. Also normal.
  • Everyone must agree on tempo. The server sets BPM and BPI. In a DAW your project tempo has to match, or nothing lines up -- see Syncing with your DAW.
  • You can vote to change tempo. See Chat and voting.

Transmitting, and not transmitting​

You do not have to send anything. A channel transmits only when you tell it to, and you can drop out without leaving -- stop transmitting, keep listening, keep chatting. This is a normal and unremarkable thing to do in a NINJAM room, whether you are tuning up, taking a break, or just there to listen.

Practice mode goes further: it lets you play against your own past interval without any of it reaching the server. Nothing you play in practice is ever transmitted, at any layer. See Syncing with your DAW.