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. One great way to do this is 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? You can use our Find New Friends feature to search the musicians in the JamKazam community as described below.
To get started, go to https://beta.jamkazam.com/friends. A search will run, and you'll see a page something like the following. (Note: If you don't get a good set of search results, it's likely you haven't run the JamKazam desktop app yet and allowed the app to run measurements using our media network.)
You'll see a list of musicians, sorted generally from lowest to highest latency (the sort order on latency is not perfect yet). 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), and when the user was last active (so you don't waste time trying to connect with someone who has been inactive for a while). The latency is the total of the other user's audio processing latency + the Internet latency between you and this user 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 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 text message, and view a slightly more detailed profile of the user (see screenshot below). You can also click the blue username text to see this user profile.
Updating the Search Filters
To change the search, click the blue Update Search button at the top right of the page above. The search dialog is displayed (see screenshot below).
By default, the search brings back Good & Fair latency connections, all skill levels, all instruments and genres, and users that have been active on JamKazam within the last 30 days.
Let's say I want to find a bass player that likes to play the blues, is either intermediate or expert in skill level on the bass, and has a good low latency connection to me. I would update the search parameters as shown in the screenshot below.
When I click the blue Search button at the bottom right of the search dialog, I see that my search results have been updated (see screenshot below).
As you can see, only users that meet the criteria specified are now shown.
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 a user 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 visit your JamKazam profile page at https://beta.jamkazam.com/profile (see screenshot below) to update your instruments, genres, your bio paragraph, and so on. This is the data the search engine will search, so you want this data to be complete and accurate to help others find you.
