I hadn’t heard of Jammit before, but I stumbled upon them after interviewing Periphery guitarist Jake Bowen for a feature that should be going up on this site soon. The software, available for PC, Mac, and iOS, breaks for example the guitar track(s) away from the rest of the music in a song. This way you can either hear just the guitar to learn it, or remove the guitar and play along with the rest of the band (as well as loop sections, slow it down while retaining pitch, etc).
One thing that strikes me as a bummer is that there’s guitar/bass/drums/keys/vocal versions of each song (when applicable). So instead of having a separate fader for each instrument, the guitar version just has two faders for the stereo guitars and then one for the rest of the band grouped together (drums, keys, vocals, bass). So if you want a bass version you have to buy it separately. It seems that the prices range from $3 to $5 per song, but that’s per instrument (Megadeth songs are on sale for $2). So if you want to isolate the bass and guitar on Pantera’s “By Demon’s Be Driven” for example, you’re paying $8.
I get how much work must go into these, and $4 for one version of a song doesn’t seem bad. But it seems like there should be bundles. Like if you buy the guitar version for $4 you get the drums/bass/and vocal ones for another $3. Because honestly you don’t really need the drums or vocals isolated to learn those parts, so I can’t imagine they sell nearly as many.
But I don’t want to poo-poo the service. It seems pretty cool and useful as long as you’re not a multi-instrumentalist. Besides Periphery and Pantera there’s Anthrax, Rush, Dream Theater, Yes, Lamb of God, and a lot of other great bands.
