ALL JAMMERS OLD AND NEW...PLEASE READ!!!

[wahwah]

Over the last couple of days, me, Stig and vhfanOU812 got our collective Transatlantic heads together to come up with some guidance and ground rules to make the Jam Forum easier for everybody to use. We've discussed some things that we want to do to make the organising and collating of all the bits and pieces easier for all concerned. This is what we've come up with:

1. One thread only. Keep everything in the same thread as it makes it difficult to see who is doing what and that means people get heated when they miss something.

2. Same bit rate and quality. When you encode your mp3, make sure that it's at 128kb/ps and at 44.1khz as these are CD quality and any higher just makes it a nightmare to get the stuff uploaded or sent via e-mail. It also has resulted in time glitches with some of you who are using Cool Edit so if we all keep to the same settings it should result in better all-round tracks.

3. Your track ONLY. What we mean by this is don't send your track already mixed in with the backing as it means we can't adjust volumes or fade-in(out)s or mix it into the track as we all obviously are using different gear and the results are, understandably, different.

4. For timing issues (ie where the guy engineering it puts your piece at the wrong starting time) I would suggest you make a low quality (11 or 22khz) mp3 of the song with your part added and send it to whichever e-mail is given. It would also make sense to e-mail all parts as Eric has a limited amount of space and with all these little bits and pieces snarling up the site, it is taking away some valuable bandwidth...it's tidier if the pieces are all sent to the one person who is co-ordinating that Jam.

5. COMMUNICATE! If you're due to go off on holiday/vacation for two weeks or you're up to your eyes in work/studies, then don't commit if you're gonna leave the thing unfinished. We don't want to be strict to rules etc...it's music for chrissake ([img]images/smilies/icon_lol.gif[/img]) but when tracks run into months when someone has gone AWOL, it puts a dampener on things. I'd also suggest we leave the breakdown of the track until we know how many are interested. If it's oversubscribed then we could always do two? No-one should feel left out... it's YOUR Forum.

6. Timing on your part...this is a difficult one. If the timing is stuck to RIGIDLY, it sounds sterile. If you run into someone's part and it CLEARLY infringes on their part, that sucks too! The best we can suggest is take a listen to J-Mart and me doing the January competition.We swoop in and out but never step on each others toes. I think it is gonna depend on the track as much as anything. I can understand where it is just sloppy and not finishing in time but it can sound sterile if it doesn't interact.

7. Watch for clipping (distortion) on your track. It's easy to bring volumes up but nigh on impossible to get rid of clipping without going ino time consuming clean-up audio programs.

8. Finally...ENJOY! We didn't set out to make a set of rules that would look right in a US Marine corp. but we did want to simplify the process and make it open to everybody as well as making clear guidelines so that we end up with Jam Tracks that could grace any album!

We hope to have a track up soon but we're looking for something special. Any questions, please PM wahwah666, vhfanOU812 or stiglar and we'll help you all we can.

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