Inside the Super MAGFest Jam Clinic

I spent this past weekend at Super MAGFest, where I led some sessions in their Jam Clinic. I was there at the invitation of Ashanti Mills, with whom I have had some great online conversations about participatory music cultures over the years.

Before I explain what I was doing there, I need to explain the video game music (VGM) scene, which I myself only found out about recently. It’s a thriving amateur community that gets together to play music from games, as well as game-adjacent genres like anime themes and vocaloid. The format resembles a jazz or blues jam, but with much wider stylistic variety.

The key thing here is that VGM isn’t a style or genre like blues; it’s more like film music, in that it encompasses a huge range of styles whose only commonality is that they happen to appear in the same media format. So just like you can hear any kind of music in a movie, you can also hear any kind of music in a game. You can point to a stereotypical “film score” sound (late-Romantic orchestral music in the John Williams idiom) just like you can point to stereotypical “game music” (chiptunes in the 1980s Nintendo idiom), but these aren’t accurate descriptors of the vast range of the actual music. There are broad trends in VGM, like the Hollywood-style scores from AAA games and the outsize influence of Japanese pop on everything else. But you also hear everything from country to R&B to Latin to polka to modern classical to many different non-Western styles, as well as unclassifiable combinations of all of the above.

Because VGM is so stylistically diverse, it supports a correspondingly wide variety of formats for amateur music making. It’s a beautiful participatory culture, in Thomas Turino’s term.

Super MAGFest is probably the largest VGM gathering of its kind (an organizer described it to me as “twenty thousand shy people being shy together”), but there are also local and regional jam scenes around the world.

The MAGFest Jam Clinic is a big room with a circular “stage” surrounded by chairs. At any given time, anywhere from five to fifty people were playing.

The jams are anchored by drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards, trumpet, trombone and the entire saxophone family. Over the course of the weekend, I also saw people play harmonica, flute, alto flute, piccolo, recorder, electric violin, electric cello, nyckelharpa, bansuri, banjo, mandolin, accordion, euphonium, sousaphone, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, a keytar triggering vocaloid samples, otamatone, and more. Anyone could just step up to a mic, plug into the PA, pick up a communal guitar or percussion instrument, and do their thing. People took turns courteously, and I didn’t witness any conflict.

The musicians played from charts on vgleadsheets.com, a meticulously maintained online archive. It’s like the Real Book, except accurate. At the Jam Clinic, they projected these charts on a huge screen, and also showed transposed versions for horn players and lyric sheets for singers on smaller screens around the room.

I had heard of maybe a tenth of the tunes that people were calling, but the regular participants seemed to know everything that came up. The most jam-friendly tunes had simple and limited chord progressions or open-ended vamps, but there were also some complex forms, odd time signatures, and through-composed passages to contend with. Outside of VGM, the key jam platform was Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon“. I heard Adam Neely’s name a lot, and the soloists quoted The Lick constantly.

The jams began each day at 10 AM and ran into the wee hours of the morning, and I never saw the room empty. Participants were mostly male, but the gender ratio wasn’t as lopsided as I expected, and there were a lot of nonbinary and trans folks. It was a racially diverse crowd, and neurodivergence seemed like it was practically an entry requirement. Most people seemed to be in their twenties and thirties, but there were younger and older people too.

There was a wide range of musical ability, knowledge and skill in the room. There was a core of professional-level players, but there were also skilled amateurs, not-so-skilled amateurs, and near-beginners. It’s extremely rare to see people at such different skill levels playing together as a group. Sometimes this made for chaotic music, but the feeling of warmth and acceptance in the room more than made up for the occasional trainwreck.

There were a lot of people outside the circle clutching their instruments nervously, just watching and listening and gradually working up the courage to jump in. That included me; I didn’t know any of the tunes, and so for most of the time I hung on the side or played a little hand percussion. But after hanging out for a few jam sessions, I felt ready to jump on a guitar and even play a couple of solos.

In addition to the regular open jams, the Jam Clinic also hosted themed sessions, ranging from Latin to blues to Indian classical. The most popular event of the weekend was band karaoke, where the assembled musicians played non-VGM hits like “Stayin’ Alive” and “Free Bird” while the crowd sang rowdily along. There were also some educational sessions, and this is why I was invited.

On my first day, I led two improvisational jam sessions. I had originally planned to play loops from Ableton and have people do structured improv exercises on top of them: play just one note, then just two notes, then pass around a phrase. We did a few of those, and they went fine, but the jam quickly started to take on a life of its own, and I just let it evolve into an open-ended funk groove which I did my best to direct in real time.

For the second jam session, I ditched my planned activities entirely. Instead, I just called a key and a tempo, counted off, and let things happen as they happened. I called soloists, sections, and call and response structures, and did my best to conduct dynamics. There was a group of ace horn players (bari sax, tenor sax, trombones, clarinet) who kept coming up with raging head arrangements and riffs, and I periodically let them steer. We had thirty people playing, and it could have been a wall of noise, but everyone was happy to take direction, so we managed to keep things sounding musical. If you are going to have a jam session with that many people, the main challenge is sheer decibels. The voices and delicate acoustic instruments tend to get obliterated even when they’re miked up. Listening is an advanced skill, as is holding back. If they invite me back, this is something I want to help everyone work on.

On my second day, I did two talks, one on sampling, one on ear training and improvisation. Both were packed and lively. For the sampling session, I talked through “Eye Know” by De La Soul. The VGM crowd includes a lot of hip-hop lovers, and heads nodded hard at the various breakbeats. We talked about the legality, morality and aesthetics of sampling, and the session could have gone on for several more hours. I got the sense that people were surprised and happy to see someone with my credentials who appreciates sample-based production.

For the ear training session, I told the story of how I (very improbably) came to be teaching university-level music theory and aural skills, and gave some broader context on recent developments in pop music pedagogy. My story resonated with a lot of people in the room, because VGM attracts autodidacts and nontraditional learners. I talked through Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves, and how we need new vocabulary to analyze and teach grooves. This got a big reaction, because the jam crowd appreciates a good groove. We got into a fascinating discussion about swing and microrhythm and how these things can and can’t be represented notationally, and about how useful DAWs are for analysis and aural learning. Once again, people were pleasantly surprised to meet an academic who is big on James Brown, J Dilla and Ableton Live.

The Jam Clinic was only one of several music venues at MAGFest. Across the hall, there was an orchestra room, where classical musicians played arrangements of the same rep that the jammers were using. On the last day, while I waited for the morning jam to get going, I listened to a wind ensemble sight-reading through an arrangement of the Wii Theme.

There was also a stage with rock bands playing rap-metal versions of VGM songs, a dance floor with DJs, a recording studio, and lots of little casual jams and performances in corners and hallways. Many of these performers were in full cosplay. It was my first time seeing someone play alto sax in a fursuit.

Beyond the music activities, there was a lot of other game-related stuff going on. There was a vast, cavernous free-play arcade with a few hundred game cabinets from the 70s through the present. Many of these were mysterious to me.

Next door was an equally vast and cavernous showcase for indie games, some of which were highly experimental. My favorite was a game where you steer a businessman through his daily routine by manipulating a gigantic bowler hat. My second favorite was this puzzle game, which I do not understand at all, but which looks really cool.

Next to that was yet another vast and cavernous space for console games. My eleven-year-old self would have been in heaven, but I quickly got sensory overload and didn’t last long.

I didn’t even have the bandwidth for the cosplay related activities, LARPing, tabletop gaming, a fully interactive Starship Enterprise bridge, and something called Zombie Tag. I also didn’t participate in any of the late-night happenings, which I’m sure were intense.

I have loved video games since I was a little kid, but have had mixed feelings about them in the years since. At times, they have felt like a guilty pleasure or even a harmful addiction. I have been seriously obsessed with a few of them, namely Tetris, Civilization IV, various flavors of SimCity, and Halo. But there are also games I can point to that have affected me as deeply as any works of music or art or literature. (If you haven’t tried Universal Paperclips, you need to.) I have liked some game soundtracks, and loved a few. But now that I know that VGM is the focus of such a beautiful amateur music scene, I want to get deeper into it. Thank you MAGFest organizers for bringing me into your world, the vibes are immaculate there.