Musical Booty Call

“Jamming is so much fun, but it’s hard to arrange.” Doyle Thomas, a nuclear engineer by vocation and a guitarist by avocation, thinks he has a solution. For the past several months he and his business partner Rosa Lea Schiavone, a Spring Valley–based booking agent, have been designing and beta-testing a new website they call Jammingout.net.

“It’s like a dating site,” Thomas says, “but for music, not romance.”

The concept behind the free service is simple: potential jammers create a profile and rate their playing-skill level on a scale from one to five, level one being for beginners and level five approaching working-pro status. In this way, musicians can source the database to find players of similar caliber. “I have jammed with some level-two players who had the skills and desire,” says Thomas, “but they were incompatible in jams with fours and fives.”

Thomas, 56, lives in San Carlos. He and Schiavone visualize turning their website into a nationwide jam outreach. “I recently had to travel across the country for work,” says Thomas, “and I jammed in every city I visited.” But, he says, it was hard to track down jam sessions. “With Jammingout.net you could find them or even arrange them.”

To keep those self-ratings honest, users can also peer-rate each other. Thomas says musicians can then source fellow jammers by either self- or peer-rating. “There are many sexual parallels,” Thomas says, “and I have been told to avoid them because it may put some people off. But, for level-four or level-five players, this is like a musical booty call.”

The website was targeted for launch by the end of July. But now, it looks like the start date may be delayed. Schiavone, 63, owns Wicked Harem Promotions. She explains that the code used to create version 1.0 is not compatible with the code needed to create additional user features that she and Thomas determined were necessary during beta-testing. “The technology we need is owned by Facebook.” She says it is available for purchase but that they may need anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 to finish the self-financed site. At present, Schiavone is posting her “jam picks of the day” on the site’s splash page.