Tele-A-Jammin: the recipe
Tele-A-Jammin
As the spring comes and fruits will be ready to harvest in no time, have you thought of making some jam? After several hiccups, the 2020 MCT generation is finally allowed to access the portal, so this is team A(wesome)’s first attempt at a jam in the NTNU-UiO portals.
How to (make) jam
Step 1: Pick the berries aka Pick a song!
Believe it or not, this step took us the most time. To continue with the metaphor, we could say that the berries were either not ripe enough, too sweet or too sour. After going back and forth to try to decide which instruments each of us is going to play and if we’ll sing, we finally decided on the Intro of the album ..?.. by The xx.
Step 2: Prepare the equipment aka Setup the connection
The same way you’d prepare the jars and the pot to make jam, we had to prepare the connection between the two portals. We intended to start with Zoom, but the tablet in NTNU was out of power (despite having been plugged in), so we had to change the plan and go on with the low latency and high quality connections.
Connecting LoLa went good - after we managed to figure out how the mixer channels were routed. We had some problems with connecting the Tico machines. After trying some basic troubleshooting, we realised it was because the converter from SDI to HTML didn’t work properly, so we replaced it and it all worked. Even the colors worked - a wonder since we had problems with that before and we didn’t know how to fix it. Alena was also unsure, in the beginning, where does the in and out from the Tico machine go - which one goes into the camera and which one in the TV screen - problem fixed using a bit of logic and experimenting.
After the tablet in Trondheim was ready to go, the Zoom connection was also set pretty quickly. However, later than they after rehearsals we tried to open the connection again with the Dungeon - a wannabe second portal in the same building as the UiO portal, and it unexpectedly crashed a few times. We fixed it by restarting the Zoom computer - not a super smart troubleshooting but effective.
Step 4: Crush the berries aka Mike up the instruments
The instrumental distribution went as follows: Choubey got the guitar part, Leigh got the drums and Alena got the piano. Since none of these were acoustic instruments, it was a relatively straightforward decision to connect them to the mixer and send them over LoLa. We needed cables, but were they long enough? Nope! So, instead of using the Jack to Jack cable for the drums we used it for the piano and we used a Jack to XLR cable for the drums (yay, stereo drums sound!). In Trondheim, Choubey also used a Jack to Jack for his guitar.
Step 5: Add the sugar aka Setup the routing and debug the feedback issues
We struggled a bit to understand the routing of the other microphones in the room, but in the end we only let the podium mic (which we moved on the piano) be unmuted. In Trondheim, … This setup allowed us to minimalism the feedback we kept hearing over LoLa. In the UiO portal we weren’t able to hear our own sound (the specific channel was muted and had the fader all the way down) so we took care of routing it back to our speakers. Not having any acoustic instruments sure came in handy!
Step 6: Boil everything aka Jam and record
After all the preparations were ready we put on the song and started jamming on it. Alena is not good at playing after the ear and her piano sheet was only on her laptop, so it was difficult to keep track of where in the song we were. She quit trying to follow the sheet at some point and played the melody notes together with the guitar. You can hear the delay between them in the recording. We kept on jamming for half an hour and at the end we were definitely better, so that was a success.
Step 7: Enjoy the jam!
Here is our recordings. We can only say that we hope you’ll see progress soon! Leigh is taking care of transcribing the notes for Alena, so she can print them and not be lost in the song anymore, and that’ll surely improve the performance. We also plan to take a higher quality recording next time.