Sugarhouse Jam!

This group is limited to eight people, because I have found if there are more than that, it becomes hard to hear each other, and to harmonize with each other. There's a big focus on listening to each other and making music together.

The Format: We go around the circle and each person either chooses a song or passes. This way the songs will be decided by whoever is there at a Jam. the song chooser chooses the key and the Tempo if they want to. We also try to allow for spontaneity and extended jams/solos, according to the mood and composition of the group.
Instruments: Pretty much any instruments are welcome. Just singing with no instrument is great too. Electric instruments are OK as long as you have a small practice amp and don’t mind keeping the volume down to harmonize with the group. I'm going to be hosting the first few groups in my apartment, so unfortunately we will have to keep the volume a bit low.

The songs: having Photo copied sheets of the music lyrics and chords (chord sheets) is actually one of the best and easiest ways for everyone to play. If you have a song you want to play be sure to bring at least 8 copies so every one can see the words and chords. If you don't have these already for your song that you want to bring, one of the best sources is ultimateguitar.com. Type the name of the song into your browser, followed by the word "chords", and chord sheets will come up for that song. Usually the first ones to come up are from Ultimate guitar, and they tend to be the easiest ones to print. Also, if you have cord sheets on your phone or a tablet, we can project them onto my TV, and that works well too. The disadvantage of this, is that we are looking at the TV instead of at each other, but the advantage is thatany song can be found on the fly, and downloaded and projected onto the TV. I use an app on my iPad, called OnSong, which only works on iPads, unfortunately. But there are similar apps for different kinds of tablets. Lastly, if you have the book Rise Up Singing, and you like the songs in there, you can bring your copy of that, and I have a few copies as well and we could use that. It's a bit tricky because the chords are sometimes hard to follow, and the type is very small.

Feel free to bring healthy snacks. We usually take about a 20 minute or so break around the middle of the jam.