Jamrr

Online Music Collaboration.

[jamrronline-blog]

So tonight I’ve ditched the coding and incessant tweeting to start work on the Jamrr Investors Presentation. It’s just a slide deck for now, but it’s a start!

[jamrronline-blog]

It’s been a while...

So Jamrr has been rather quiet for quite a while now. I decided to take a contract job in the music industry, working on their IT and web infrastructure. There were two reasons for this:

Replenishing funds - After living in Shoreditch for 3 years, my personal savings have somewhat diminished. London living is expensive, especially when you’re working short-term contracts and trying to build your own thing in your own time. I eventually decided to move out of the city this year, and I’m now living in the cheaper, and far prettier city of Bath.

Knowledge is Power - Working on infrastructure for a music company as big as the one I’m currently working for has given me invaluable knowledge on cloud infrastructures, large-scale hosting and application development on scaleable hardware. This is something you simply cannot learn from a book. Until you’ve handled 11,000 music fans visiting a band website in under 3 minutes, you don’t know how to deal with scaleable software!

So now my current contract is coming to an end, and I’m looking to re-ignite the Jamrr project. I’ll be posting on here as much as possible to let people know where it’s at.

Thanks

- Andy

[jamrronline-blog]

A Quick Update

The plan today is to work on the investors pitch for our Seedrs Campaign. We're hoping to have our presentation video done by the end of tomorrow, so we can start raising funds.

[jamrronline-blog]

Developing a Custom UI Framework

For the development of the Jamrr platform, we've decided to create our own UI framework, rather than using an out-of-the-box solution such as Bootstrap or JQuery UI. It wasn't a decision that was taken lightly, and the the fact that we've opted for the custom route means we've increased our overall development time, but we've decided to highlight some of the reasons for our decision below:

Customisation

Whilst the JQuery UI framework has some pretty awesome functionality, the theme looks a little, well, dated. The glass-styled headers are a bit too "Windows Vista" for our tastebuds. Of course, we realise that we could still use the framework and just heavily modify the CSS for the framework, but that leads us onto point number two...

Where's the challenge?

Sure, we could use a prebuilt UI framework. There are plenty out there to choose from, each with their pros and cons; but where's the challenge in using a prebuilt framework? We don't just want to build an awesome product, we want to build and awesome product and learn a thing or two on the way. We see developing the UI framework ourselves as a sort of warm-up exercise for the challenges ahead.

Giving a little something back

It goes without saying that any cool stuff we develop in the process of creating Jamrr will be passed on to the coding and design community. We're hoping to make our UI framework available for download, and we'll probably be creating a theme generator to accompany it.

Did we mention the challenge thing?

Seriously, we love puzzles.

Oh, and here's a sneak preview of what we've done so far...

[jamrronline-blog]

UI design for Jamrr has begun.

[jamrronline-blog]

What is Jamrr?

The idea behind Jamrr is to create an online platform for indie musicians and bands to collaborate on musical projects. We want musicians across the globe to join in with the creation of each other's music creations, without the imposing limit of physical distance.

Imagine, for example, that you're a singer-songwriter based in London. You've got a pretty decent home studio set up, and you've recorded some guitar and vocal demos on your favourite DAW. The next step is to develop these demo ideas into something you can self-release or send to record labels. In order to do that, you need to flesh out the tracks with other instruments.

The problem that you have is that finding a drummer or a bassist in your area is hard enough. Add to that the cost of rehearsal space, recording time, and even time spent refining what you want the musicians to do, and your small demo has suddenly become a very expensive, time-consuming project.

With Jamrr, you'll be able to post your demo online, with a list of requirements (e.g. drum, bass guitar and keyboard tracks required). Musicians from around the globe can then contribute their ideas for your demo. You can then pick the tracks you like the best, and use them for your project. How you reward your pseudo-session musicians is up to you. You can give them anything from a writing credit to a cash reward for their efforts.

With the revolutionary changes that have rocked the music industry in the past 15 years, we believe that the process of writing and recording music is the only part of the chain that remains largely stuck in the past. We live in a world powered by social collaboration, and the Jamrr team want to create a platform which allows the music we create to be powered by the same principles that power other crowd sourcing platforms.

We're still hoping to have a release-ready version of the platform up by Summer 2014, but we're going to need help. We're looking for investors to help fund the project, and we're looking for indie musicians to help us develop the platform into something they can use.

If you'd like to be involved, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]