After getting your audio gear set up to be able to play in sessions, the next critical thing for you to do is get connected to other musicians on JamKazam. When doing this, you typically want to find other musicians that share your musical interests, play complementary instruments to yours, and have a low latency Internet connection to you - but how do you find them? There are two primary ways of doing this on JamKazam.
Scheduling Future Sessions with Specific Songs, Artists, or Genres
You can use the Create Session feature to schedule a future session, either for a specific time or TBD, and then set a theme of either a setlist of specific songs, one or more specific artists, or one or more specific genres to be the focus of the session. When you do this, it will automatically generate notifications to the musicians in the JamKazam community who like to play the same songs, who like to play the catalogs of the same artists, and who like to play the same genres as you, and who have good latency connections to you. This is a great way to get connected to others who share your interests and want to play. The help article on creating sessions is a good one to review for details on how to do this.
Using the Find New Friends Search Feature
You can also use our Find New Friends feature to search musicians in the JamKazam community as described below. To get started, click the Find Friends link in the left navigation bar of the website, or go to https://www.jamkazam.com/friends.
Click the Update Search button at the top right of the page. A search feature is displayed (pictured below).
We'd suggest you leave Latency set to Good or Fair, so that your research results include only musicians with whom you can have a session with latency supporting a fun session.
- Searching by Artist - Let's say you love to play a bunch of songs by the artist Pink Floyd. You can type "Pink Floyd" in the Artists search box and select Pink Floyd from the list. Then click the Search button. You'll see search results of musicians who also like to play songs from the Pink Floyd catalog and who can connect to you with solid latency. Or let's say you like grunge, you could enter and select Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Alice in Chains. In this case, you'd see search results of musicians who like to play any of these artists' music.
- Searching by Song - Similarly, here you can search for other musicians who like to play one specific song - e.g. Melissa by the Allman Brothers. Or you can search and select an entire setlist of songs, and your search results will include musicians who like to play any (not necessarily all) of these songs.
- Searching by Genre - You can search by genre(s) in this same way to find other musicians who like to play jazz or the blues or more specific sub-genres. We now offer thousands of genres to choose from, so you can get very specific with your tastes and interests.
- Searching by Combination - You can also get more specific if you're looking for a very specific person. For example, you could specify the artist Pink Floyd and the instrument Bass Guitar to find a bass player who likes to play Pink Floyd songs.
Regardless of your search parameters, when you run a search, you'll see a search results page (pictured below).
You'll see a list of musicians, sorted generally from lowest to highest latency. The information you see for each musician is as follows:
- Name Column
Here you see the user's name (clickable blue link text), Status (whether the user is currently online or offline), Latency (worst case latency between you and this user, may be less, but should be in this ballpark), and when the user was last active (so you don't waste time trying to connect with someone who has been inactive for a long time). The latency is the total latency (audio processing + Internet) between you and the musician over the JamKazam media network. In about 60% of cases, we find that peer-to-peer (p2) connections are lower latency than the server-based media network connections, so you'll often find you have even better latency than what's estimated from this search feature. - About Column
This displays whatever the user wrote about themselves in their JamKazam bio. Sometimes this is a lot, sometimes a little. - Instruments Column
This shows you what instruments this user plays, and what level of expertise they have for each instrument. - Genre Column
This shows you what musical genres this user is most interested in playing. - Actions Column
There are three blue buttons in this column that you can use to send a connection request, send a message, and view a more detailed profile of the user (including the songs, artists, and other interests of the musician if they've filled in this data on their profile). You can also click the blue username text to see this user profile.
Making Contact with Potential New Friends
While you can simply click the blue "+" button in the Actions column to quickly fire off a friend connection request to another community member you may want to play with, we'd suggest you first use the messaging button to send them a message explaining who you are and why you think it would be cool to connect, what kind of music you might want to play together, etc. If you vibe while messaging, you can then send a connection request later. Or you may send them a message and then send them a connection request right after sending your first message, so they at least have some context for the connection request.
If the user is currently offline (which is normal), they'll get an in-app notification next time they are on the app, and they will often also receive an email notification of your message and connection request.
Being Found in Search by Potential New Friends
Keep in mind that you're not going to be the only one out there searching. Others will be searching for you, too. So be sure to fill out your own JamKazam profile with your interests. Instructions on how to do this are available in this profile help article.