In this help article, we discuss why and how JamKazam is the best platform for online music instruction and lessons, with a focus on common use cases during an online lesson, including:
- Enjoy Studio Quality Audio
- View High Definition Video
- Play Together Live in Sync
- Adjust Session Mix
- Use Multiple Webcams
- Use Backing Tracks
- Share Lesson Documents
- Record Lesson Demonstrations
Enjoy Studio Quality Audio
The importance of the quality of the audio in an online music educational session cannot be overstated. If the audio sounds like you're sitting right next to each other or in a professional recording studio, both the instructor and student will feel the beauty and the energy of the music, and both can hear the nuances of what is being played or sung.
Zoom's default codec (the technology that processes audio in Zoom) is designed to process people talking - not music. This crushes the life out of musical audio. While you can set preferences to "original sound" to improve Zoom's handling of musical audio, it is still not going to reach the quality of JamKazam, which was built from the ground up specifically for music.
JamKazam uses the Opus codec, which is the industry's best audio processing technology for delivering studio-quality audio, balanced with ultra-low latency (critical for playing together, more on this later). When you get into your first JamKazam session, you'll be delighted by how amazing the audio sounds. It really is like being in a recording studio together.
Here is a video showing a number of groups playing together on JamKazam. The audio is unedited and is what the musicians heard in their headphones while performing together.
JamKazam and Zoom both offer high-definition video in sessions.
If you have ever tried to play music live and in sync with other musicians on Zoom, you'll know it just doesn't work. This is a very tough tech problem, and Zoom wasn't designed or built to solve this problem. It was designed to let people talk with each other.
JamKazam has produced numerous innovations in this area, all of which are critical to delivering the lowest possible latency (lag) for online music performance in the world. We use the Opus codec to process audio. We offer rich configuration options on the audio interfaces that digitize your vocal and instrumental audio to make this happen as fast as possible. We designed and patented jitter queue technology to deal with Internet blips. We uniquely support both peer-to-peer (p2p) and server-based streaming connections to automatically deliver the fastest Internet path possible. We could go on, but if you want to learn more about the many unique JamKazam innovations that make our platform the fastest in the world for online music performance, you can check out our blog series on latency in online music performance.
To validate that musicians can perform live in sync on JamKazam over the Internet, check out the video above (in the audio quality section of this article), or visit our YouTube channel to see a bunch more groups playing together successfully.
When playing music with others, it's essential that you be able to control the mix of audio in a session, so that you can hear everything comfortably and clearly, and so that the mix is balanced and pleasing. There isn't a way to do this in Zoom, as it was built for video conferencing with voice chat.
JamKazam offers robust controls that let each musician in an online session customize their own personal mix. Let's say you're an instructor, and you have two audio tracks set up for yourself - one for a piano/keyboard instrument and one for vocals to sing. And let's say you have a student in your session who also has two audio tracks set up - one for keys and one for vocals. You will have controls to adjust the level/volume of your vocals vs. your keyboard vs. your student. You can bring the volume of any of these up/down in the mix to get your mix to sound great to you - without affecting what your student hears. And your student can do the same. You can even use pan controls to move any of these tracks around in the mix to create more space and clarity. Below is a screenshot showing the session controls, with a volume slider displayed to adjust the volume of a session participant, and you can learn more about how to use personal mix controls in this help article.
Use Multiple Webcams
For music instruction, it can be really useful and sometimes critical to use multiple webcams and video streams. For example, an instructor may want to have one webcam on their face to communicate and maintain rapport with their student, with a second webcam pointing at their instrument so the student can see what the instructor is doing mechanically.
Zoom supports a single webcam, while JamKazam has built-in support for multiple webcams. We will note that there are third-party tools one can use to push multiple webcams through Zoom, but it's not built into Zoom, so it's more complicated, while JamKazam has plug-and-play support built in for multiple webcams.
Following is a screenshot of the JamKazam video controls for using multiple webcams.
<insert screenshot here>
And the screenshot below shows the JamKazam video window with an example of a single user using one webcam for their face and a second webcam to show their instrument.
<insert screenshot here>
It's often useful in online instruction sessions to use backing tracks. For example, a flute student might play along with a recorded piano accompaniment, or a guitar student might improvise over a blues backing track. This is made easy in JamKazam, as you can open .mp3, .wav, and other common audio file formats in the app, play the audio file, and the audio of your live performance is mixed with the playback of the backing track (see screenshot below). You can control the level/volume of the backing track relative to your live performance using the same personal mix controls on the backing track.
During lessons, instructors sometimes want to share notation files or other educational documents with students. To do this, the instructor can simply click the Files button in the session toolbar and select a file to share from their computer. A link to the shared file is placed into the session chat stream (see screenshot below), and the student can click this link to download the shared file to their computer.
Instructors also demonstrate various techniques during online instruction. Students can easily record these demonstrations to refer back to a video to remember the details of what was taught. While in a session, the student can click the Record button in the session toolbar and select the "record audio + video" option (see screenshot below).
When the student stops recording, a window is automatically opened with the video file ready to use.