I tried a virtual jam with a co-worker in March or April but I can't say it worked well. We didn't try ejamming. We work at BT in the collaboration division so we are quite comfortable with remote meeting tools. We tried Webex, Zoom, and MS Teams and the biggest issue we had in my opinion was equipment. Secondary was lag. The Lag might have become a major problem if we solved the equipment issue though. The specific equipment issue I believe was cased by noise reduction or cancellation.
the equipment on my side was an e906 mic on my amp and SM58 vocal mic going through my Focusrite interface with headphones plugged into the interface using direct monitoring. My friend said the sound was coming through really clear on his side. However, he was using his computer mic to pick up room audio for both his voice and his guitar. to hear the audio he was using an external speaker hooked up to his PC. The audio quality I was hearing from his side was not great but acceptable until we both tried to play at the same time. When he was playing and I tried to solo, his audio would cut out from my perspective. From his perspective, the audio was great and I was not cutting out. I suspect that the PC mic he was using was trying to reduce feedback and cutting out both my playing coming through the speaker (which is good) but also his playing. His mic might also be trying to pick out human voice and remove background noise and since it wasn't recognizing guitar, it was cutting it out.
Anyway, the audio cut out was our biggest issue. Since I don't see him running out to buy mics and an interface we were not going to get by that. But even if we did get by that, I suspect lag and audio compression were going to be the next issues. I think video conferencing would work well for online lessons where you can take turns. But there are definitely some challenges to online jamming. In fact, during this pandemic I've head a number of bands say they wanted to do a remote concert but they could technically make it work. The only examples i've seen of an online jam or show were actually not recorded live but recorded one part at a time and then passed on to the next person.
