August update

Two quick updates:

First, Slower Than Dirt jams are moving online starting this month and continuing until it’s safe to meet in groups indoors again. That might be a while. Jams will be held using a teleconferencing app such as Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, Jitsi, WebEx, or the like. Because conferencing apps are unsuitable for playing music together in sync, the way it will work is the jam leader will be audible to everyone who connects, but everyone else will be muted during tunes. You’ll be able to hear the leader and yourself, but nobody else. Between tunes we can unmute and chat. There might also be a low-latency audio session going on Jamulus at the same time, for people who want to try real-time jamming online; I need to experiment with that.

Second, all of the core tunes should now have play-along recordings and sheet music available on their individual pages. If you run into any problems with them, please drop us a line using the contact page. The play-along recordings are at a fixed tempo and have accompaniment tracks courtesy of StrumMachine.com, whose developer has graciously given me permission to use it for this purpose. If you’d like to play along to backing tracks at different tempos, make your own chord charts, adjust the volume of the individual backing instruments, and other things you can’t do with the play-along tracks here, I recommend checking Strum Machine out. There’s a free two week trial, and it’s currently $5/month after that, which seems pretty reasonable to me. (That’s not an affiliate link or anything; I just really like this tool, and I want to help support the guy who wrote — and, I assume, played all the instruments for — it.)