This time hopefully with working audience room! Advanced sound! Music and dancing and graphics and all done live from four different buildings in four different parts of London. Probably about 45 minutes. Bring your own booze.

Join us at 7pm BST on the 12th of June at watch.handsomejacks.co.uk or watch the livestream on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvjOvV16Obg

Join us!

People said the last few shows were too short, so we bring you a 50% longer show!

A full 45 minute set from 7pm on the last day before British Summer time, Saturday the 27th of March 2021.

Expect four people in separate bedrooms all around London playing with each other live. There will be guitars, keyboards, singing, drums and bass to entertain you with songs and jokes and graphics effects.

Thrill at the danger of the precarious knowledge that it’s a wonder any of this technology works and it could all fail at any time.

Maybe even a new song!

Nobody else is doing a show like this.

We bring back the well received “clap-o-matic audience-o-tron” crowd feedback system. You can cheer and clap and boo without even opening your mouth just at the click of your mouse.

The sound in the audience room should be *amazing* compared to last time so no need to head youtube for good sound, if you have a laptop you can join the audience and show us your face! Please do!

The bar chat-room will be open for you to chat to each other before and after the gig. Some of the band might even join you after our debrief.

Android/iOS machines will still be better off at the youtube link.

Either way, join us at 19:00 GMT on Saturday 27th of March, wherever you are at https://watch.handsomejacks.co.uk/

Sign up at our Facebook Event

Join us without leaving home at
https://watch.handsomejacks.co.uk/

For the first time, featuring our clap-o-tron.

That’s right everyone, for the very first time our online show will feature our experimental clap-o-matic audience-o-tron crowd feedback system.

Designed and implemented exclusively for Handsome Jack’s Showband Internet Gig’s this crowd feedback system allows those viewing the event live in the audience room to clap and cheer and give feedback to the band without un-muting your microphones at the mere click of a button.

With these experiments and constant improvements to the Handsome Jack’s Showband Internet Gig Experience you can be sure that nobody else has quite the same quality of experience as Handsome Jack’s fans.

LIVE?!?

Do you like fun and excitement and adventure and really wild things?

Do you like to do them from your bed in your pajamas on a Sunday afternoon?

Then have we got the show for you!

Handsome Jack’s Showband’s Internet Gig Version Two is a Sunday afternoon one.

Come join us online and watch us play some songs from four different rooms around the city!

Join us without leaving home at 4pm Sunday the 21st of June 2020 at
https://watch.handsomejacks.co.uk/

Join the “stage” room to share your video and be a part of the show.

Join the “bar” room to watch the stream and chat together instead.
Watch the “stream” to just enjoy the mayhem without having to be a part of it.

Or wait until after and watch the recording. That’ll be a thing too.

Be one of the few people who can say “Yeah, I was there at version two! Just as it got good! Wasn’t at the the first one admittedly, but was still there before they really perfected it!”

Watch it again in the bar immediately afterwards. Some of the band might even join you. Maybe.

What happens when four people in different houses all try and play a live gig thing for twenty minutes in front of a video-conference audience?

Help us find out, this Thursday 28th may at 9pm BST.

Join the audience, or watch the live-stream. Or if you’re too square to be there, watch the recording of the live-stream afterwards.

Coming to you live simultaneously from four different rooms across London, Handsome Jack’s Showband present a live online experience you’ll treasure.

Get bragging rights, get a story for your grandchildren about how you were there, in the beginning, at the very first Handsome Jack’s Internet Gig, before it became a global phenomenon.

The show will be live-streamed here on Facebook-live, or join us in the audience room to cheer and heckle and have your beautiful smiling faces featured.

Turn on and tune in at 9pm on Thursday 28th of May for about 20 minutes of whatever this turns out to be like.

Audience-Room Link: https://meet.jit.si/jackaudience

Facebook Live Link: https://www.facebook.com/handsomejacks/live/

[You will want to pick one, not do both, Facebook stream will be on a 30 second delay]

I published the Amazon Machine Image (the server template) that I built which we’ve been using and sent these instructions. Apparently they were good enough that it was possible for someone fearing they weren’t technical enough who had never before used Amazon Web Services or hosted any kind of server at all or done any programming.

Running a server costs a few quid per hour. Way less than renting a practice room.

Before you start you need to have registered with Amazon Web Services and logged in to their main page.

1) My machine-image is available only in London data-center, so we need to pick “Europe (London) eu-west-2” from the drop-menu on the top-right of the header-bar.

[If anyone outside London really needs it, apparently it is possible for me to copy it to another region. Let me know, pre @ dalliance.net ]

[EDIT: It’s been copied to Asia Pacific, Tokyo and Singapore as well.]

2) We want to use “Elastic Compute Cloud”, known as EC2. So pick “Services” menu, top-left. Click “EC2” to get the service for rending Elastic Compute Cloud servers.

3) Click “Launch Instance” in Orange at the bottom.

4) Click “Community AMIs” (AMI = Amazon Machine Image) in the left hand side dropbox to try and find the one I made.

5) The server I made was assigned the random ID: “0a8cb6a239f6c2f0d” so type that in to the search.

Hopefully it comes up in the search results as “JamulusServer – ami-0a8cb6a239f6c2f0d”

[
EDIT: It has been copied to these other zones:
Asia Pacific, Tokyo: ami-0d1a691dc2c7dd410
Asia Pacific, Singapore: ami-079b02a7786cdf5f6
US East, North Virginia: ami-0fd7e3fa3d50deb8b
Europe, Frankfurt: ami-0a4703f3c89847901
]

“Runs a Jamulus server. Your security group should open port 22124”

6) Click the “Select” button next to that.

7) Select a “t3.medium” server from the list of types of server. I have no idea if that’s more power than
is really needed, probably it’s overkill, but I am sure it is enough

Click “configure instance details” at the bottom for the next page.

8) Instance detail defaults are all fine here, click “Next: Add Storage”

9) Storage default is 8GB which is fine, click “Next: Add Tags”

10) Don’t need any tags, click “Next: Configure Security Group”

11) We need to open up the firewall on the server to allow users to contact it on the UDP port upon which it listens: 22124

Click “Add Rule”, select in each field (don’t type the quotes):
“Custom UDP Rule” / “UDP” / 22124 / “0.0.0.0/0, ::/0”
Leave the right column blank.

The second time you do this, if you’re doing it again, you may instead choose “Select an existing security group” and then select the one you created this time with that rule already in place.

If you give the Security Group Name a good name and description you’ll find it easier to do so. Call it “Jamulus” or something.

At some point it may scare you saying something like “Your server is open to the public! This might be a security issue!”. It is possible here to get the address of everyone in your band and add that to the server firewall so that only your band can connect to the server.

But it’s a pain, and the chances of a random stranger wondering into your un-advertised server are almost zero. If they do, just jam with them and drop me a line saying how it went.

Click “Review And Launch”

12) Review if you want, then click “Launch”

13) Key-Pairs are like a password used to get in touch with the server to make changes to it.

You won’t want to make any changes to it, but it won’t let you launch without a key-pair.

Select “create a new key pair” then “Download key pair” and save the file, or throw it away. Doesn’t matter.

The second time you might select to just reuse the one you downloaded this time.

Click “Launch Instances”

14) It’s launching the server now. Click “View Instances” to see it.

15) One of the servers in the list should be “initializing”.

Click that one and the bottom part of the screen will show details about it.

Its address is the “Public DNS (IPv4)” on the top right of that section.

If you move the mouse over that you will see an icon popup with a “copy to clipboard” option.

If you click that the name of the server will be copied to your clipboard.

16) Paste that name into the Jamulus client running on everyone’s machines as the server address to connect to that server.

You can then play together!

17) When you are finished, you will want to close the machine down, or else Amazon will continue charging you a few dollars an hour for it.

Click the server in the list so its details are on the bottom half of the page, then click “Actions”, at the top of the page. Click “Instance State”, and “Terminate”

It’ll then close down and Amazon will stop charging you at the end of the hour.

Music is all about timing, and not only is there a delay between you talking and your band-mates hearing it in those video-conference apps but that delay is even variable. You couldn’t compensate even if you could compensate.

But as you can see from the video of our first proper online band-practice here, it can be done.

The key is of course the right software. And that software is a little open-source application called Jamulus. It is not fancy. It is not all that pretty. It doesn’t do video. It concentrates on one thing: Getting that lag down as low as it can go.

You will help the software by all being in the same city, for a start. The lag half-way around the world isn’t going to work for anyone.

You’ll all want fiber broadband ideally, and ADSL or cable internet at least. The fastest you can buy!

Everyone needs to download the Jamulus software and install it on their Windows/Mac/Linux machine. Then everyone connects to the same server.

But which server? Aren’t they all overloaded because of everyone having to stay inside because there’s a virus stalking the streets?

That is the beauty of open-source. You can just run your own!

You want a server in your city, as close to everyone in the band as possible. We used an Amazon Web Services cloud server. They have compute centers in a few big cities, and luckily for us London is one of them.

If you can all use the same ISP it’s going to help, and especially then you can maybe host the server in your home. Or rent one from that ISP themselves.

I spot-rented a t3-medium Linux machine for a few hours, installed the Jamulus software on it and ran it under the command-line with:

./Jamlulus -s -n

The “-s” says “Be a server” and the “-n” says “Don’t try and open any windows, this machine hasn’t got a graphics card”.

Then you just need to give the IP address of your server to your band mates and have them connect to it.

In Linux, it runs on JackD. You want to launch JackD with very low latency. That’s the “-p 128” here:

/usr/bin/jackd -dalsa -dhw:0,0 -r48000 -p128 -n2

Then run the Jamulus software.

Our bassist was on Windows and our Drummer and Guitarist are on Macs while I’m a Linux guy. So everything works cross platform, but I have no tips on whatever they might have done to tune it.

Everyone gets a volume-slider for each person in the band so they can tune their own mix. You see me turn up my vocals audio in the video here. That didn’t affect the noises in the other guy’s rooms.

You will have to find a way to mix your microphone and instrument sounds down into a single jack or USB input for input to the computer. My synth allows me to plug a mic into it. Think the rest have some kinda hardware splitters.

The software works by sending signals as fast as it can to the server, which forwards them as fast as it can to everyone. But the internet is a strange thing, and the bits of sound don’t arrive in the same order that they are sent. In order to not have any break in the sound, it has to store up a few of the packets of sound in a queue, slotting each bit of sound into the right order as they arrive and feeding the queue into the sound-card at your end.

If that queue is too long, you get lag and delay and can’t play in sync.

If that queue is too short, some of the sound arrives out of order and kinda sounds like it wobbles and chirps. Known as “jitter”. You have a slider to change the length of the queues.

With them set to about six, and an incredible 2ms ping to the AWS server, I was getting about a 40ms lag. The rest of the band broadly similar.

This is just about playable, but feels weird.

Our Guitarist Adds:

Oh. If only I had fibre and a 2 ms ping. That would have given me <10ms latency. As it was, I had a 15/20ms ping with my cable connection, for a 35/45ms round trip. Odd, but workable once you get used to it. Which didn’t take that long, really. Needs must and that.

That only gives you audio, and it isn’t enough. It really isn’t. So we run a Zoom meeting alongside it. I put the Zoom on a different Laptop. The bassist had his phone running the Zoom app and his laptop running Jamulus. I think the guitarist and the drummer ran the zoom just in a different window on the same machine.

The video is not in sync, obviously.

Thought y’all might want a few clues on how we managed it.

The guy who wrote Jamulus seems bemused and surprised at how his software which was getting like one download a month until last month has shot up in popularity coz everyone’s not able to get to band practice now and he may be a bit overloaded with support email.

He is not a big corporation.

So I thank him. Cheers dude.

—-

We’re playing an afternoon gig at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden on Sunday the 5th of April

Doors about 2.30pm, show start about 3.30pm.

Everyone out by 6pm

It’s our drummer’s birthday that week, so come celebrate with us.

The Fiddlers Elbow
1 Malden Road, NW5 3HS London, United Kingdom
5th April 2020

Doors about 2.30pm, show start about 3.30pm.

Everyone out by 6pm

It’s our frontman’s birthday three days before that, so come celebrate with us.