> don't listen to your local audio signal, you only listen to the mixed signal coming from the server ... I don't think it'll work very well because his acoustic kit will be too loud
Yes, that sounds right. Whether this sort of approach works depends a lot on whether your instrument is naturally quiet enough that you can just focus on what you hear from the server. People are actually surprisingly good at adjusting to instruments that are "slow to sound"; just like you can bounce a basketball on the beat with a little practice, even though it takes many milliseconds for the ball to hit the ground after leaving your hand, you can learn to play keyboard etc with a similar delay.
We had a zoom video going at the same time so we could look at each other. What tripped my brain up the most was if I looked for rhythm cues from the video while playing, even my own video would not be in sync and I would lose the zone where I could play in delayed time and have to restart
Yes, that sounds right. Whether this sort of approach works depends a lot on whether your instrument is naturally quiet enough that you can just focus on what you hear from the server. People are actually surprisingly good at adjusting to instruments that are "slow to sound"; just like you can bounce a basketball on the beat with a little practice, even though it takes many milliseconds for the ball to hit the ground after leaving your hand, you can learn to play keyboard etc with a similar delay.