The ask: find the top ten jam candidates where the jam itself is 5 to 10 minutes and starts at least 4 minutes into the track, past the composed song part. I pulled the phish.in Jamcharts corpus (5,047 curated jams) and used phish.in's own jam_starts_at_second annotation to measure exactly where each jam begins.
🎵 We wanted to find Phish songs where the band plays the written song for about 4 minutes, then jams for 5 to 10 minutes. We used a big Phish website to find the exact second the jam starts.
Every jam-start and jam-length below is phish.in's own annotation, not an estimate. Ranked by community likes. These span 1992 to 2019.
| # | Date | Song | Jam starts | Jam length | Total | ❤ | Venue | Listen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1993-12-31 | Harry Hood | 5:45 | 7:36 | 13:21 | 233 | Worcester, MA | phish.in ↗ |
| 2 | 1997-08-10 | Harry Hood | 5:27 | 9:11 | 14:38 | 51 | Noblesville, IN | phish.in ↗ |
| 3 | 1994-11-12 | Harry Hood | 6:13 | 9:24 | 15:37 | 39 | Kent, OH | phish.in ↗ |
| 4 | 2003-02-28 | Harry Hood | 5:10 | 9:43 | 14:53 | 29 | Uniondale, NY | phish.in ↗ |
| 5 | 1994-10-23 | Harry Hood | 5:45 | 9:18 | 15:03 | 28 | Gainesville, FL | phish.in ↗ |
| 6 | 1994-07-16 | Harry Hood | 7:10 | 8:59 | 16:09 | 27 | North Fayston, VT | phish.in ↗ |
| 7 | 1992-04-18 | Harry Hood | 7:16 | 6:25 | 13:41 | 25 | Palo Alto, CA | phish.in ↗ |
| 8 | 1996-12-06 | Harry Hood | 6:13 | 9:29 | 15:42 | 23 | Las Vegas, NV | phish.in ↗ |
| 9 | 2019-11-30 | Harry Hood | 5:28 | 9:19 | 14:47 | 23 | Providence, RI | phish.in ↗ |
| 10 | 1994-04-10 | Harry Hood | 5:33 | 8:56 | 14:29 | 22 | Buffalo, NY | phish.in ↗ |
🟢 Here are the 10 best jams that fit the rules. They are all a song called Harry Hood. In Harry Hood, the band sings for about 5 or 6 minutes, then plays a beautiful jam that grows bigger and bigger for about 8 or 9 minutes. Perfect for a video.
HONEST FINDING Of all 5,047 Jamcharts tracks, phish.in only fills in the exact jam_starts_at_second field for 109 tracks, and every one is Harry Hood. Two more reasons Hood dominates:
🟡 Why all Harry Hood? Because the website only wrote down the exact jam-start time for Harry Hood songs. And the other famous jams are too long, more than 10 minutes. Harry Hood is just the right size.
The 5 to 10 minute limit is a production cap: we cut the jam down so the stem-to-MIDI input stays small, then separate and transcribe. For each candidate I found the jam-start (past the composed song, at least 4:00 in) and cut an ~8 minute clip from there. Jam-starts for Ghost, Bathtub Gin, and Chalk Dust came from the vocal envelope (validated against phish.in's Hood annotations, about +15 to +20s conservative); Reba and Antelope came from the strongest structural boundary (their composed parts are instrumental, so the vocal method does not apply).
| Song | Date | Full | Jam start | Cut window | Cut len | Pipeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghost | 1998-07-06 | 15:46 | 5:57 | 5:57 to 13:57 | 8:00 | cut ✓ stem ✓ midi ✓ |
| Bathtub Gin | 1997-08-17 | 15:22 | 4:27 | 4:27 to 12:27 | 8:00 | cut ✓ stem ✓ midi ✓ |
| Chalk Dust Torture | 1999-07-10 | 14:19 | 2:59 | 4:00 to 12:00 | 8:00 | cut ✓ stem ✓ midi ✓ |
| Reba | 1993-12-31 | 13:31 | 5:31 | 6:00 to 13:30 | 7:30 | cut ✓ stem ✓ midi ✓ |
| Run Like an Antelope | 1998-04-03 | 14:30 | 3:20 | 4:00 to 12:00 | 8:00 | cut ✓ stem ✓ midi ✓ |
Cut files: ~/Projects/_outputs/phish-jam-cuts/<song>-<date>_jam_MM-SS_to_MM-SS.mp3 (5 files, 7:30 to 8:00 each). Chalk Dust and Antelope jam-starts fell just under 4:00, so their cuts are floored to 4:00 to stay safely past the song. Done: demucs 6-stem on each cut, then basic-pitch (ONNX) on the five pitched stems plus onset drums. 30 MIDI files, 53,247 notes in ~/Projects/_outputs/phish-jam-cuts/midi/<cut>/.
🟢 We took 5 long Phish jams and cut each one down to about 8 minutes, starting right where the jam begins (after the song). Now the computer is splitting each clip into separate instruments, and then it will turn each instrument into MIDI notes.
Same verified phish.in facts, jam-start not yet measured. Queued for the same audio pass.
| Song | Date | Total | ❤ | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gumbo | 1999-09-14 | 10:23 | 67 | Boise, ID |
| Slave to the Traffic Light | 1999-07-04 | 11:41 | 56 | Atlanta, GA |
| Light | 2015-08-22 | 15:40 | 56 | Watkins Glen, NY |
| Stash | 1995-11-14 | 15:31 | 54 | Orlando, FL |
| Simple | 1997-08-16 | 11:09 | 42 | Limestone, ME |
| Twist | 1997-11-14 | 15:58 | 42 | West Valley City, UT |
| Cut | bass | guitar | piano | other | vocals | drums |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghost 7/6/98 | 1357 | 1812 | 1379 | 2320 | 522 | 1595 |
| Bathtub Gin 8/17/97 | 2356 | 4165 | 2562 | 2305 | 1599 | 1479 |
| Chalk Dust 7/10/99 | 1150 | 4358 | 1340 | 3134 | 653 | 1537 |
| Reba 12/31/93 | 1084 | 2267 | 1212 | 1738 | 540 | 1822 |
| Antelope 4/3/98 | 1282 | 3183 | 958 | 1781 | 588 | 1169 |
1. Cut (done): fetch full audio from phish.in, find the jam-start, cut a 5 to 10 minute clip starting at least 4:00 in. Five clips in ~/Projects/_outputs/phish-jam-cuts/.
2. Stem (done): demucs -n htdemucs_6s on each cut into drums, bass, guitar, piano, vocals, other. 30 stems.
3. MIDI (done): basic-pitch (ONNX) on the five pitched stems plus onset drums per cut. 30 MIDI files in ~/Projects/_outputs/phish-jam-cuts/midi/. The remaining 6 pool songs stay queued.
🟢 Step 1: cut each jam down to about 8 minutes. Step 2: split each clip into separate instruments. Step 3: turn each instrument into MIDI notes. All three steps are done for the top 5 jams.