Jammit – Like a Mixing Board for Your Pocket

by Kira Grunenberg

If you’ve ever been in a recording studio, then you know what goes into building a mix from nothing to drums, bass, guitar, keys, vocals and any other bells or whistles you might want to throw in. Once a track is mastered and bounced to a disc, there’s no more disassembly. You could re-import the song into a program like ProTools to play around with the finished waveform but you couldn’t completely splice out that bass track if you suddenly wanted to change a note or two. You’d have to go back to the original mix.

Fortunately, now there are existing applications that allow for tweaking, altering and decorating recordings -and doing so on the fly, away from a board. Apple’s program GarageBand, included with their OSX, provides a sizable amount of variety for musicians looking to get creative with finished recordings and it has a version available for the iPad.

In an effort to raise the bar on this front through, a newly developed program, “Jammit,” packages the ability to isolate, manipulate and replicate songs and their respective individual tracks, with relative simplicity and a mix board user-interface to keep the feeling realistic.

A program available in both Windows and Apple desktops, as well as portable iOS devices, Jammit is marketing itself to be very flexible to users. The company even addresses a question about imminent accessibility for visually impaired users in their FAQ, which is slated to be in future developments.

How appealing and effective is the program to back all of this universality? Jammit itself is free for download. It’s the extra content you purchase that makes all the difference. For starters, major artists are already in on the action. Progressive metal band, Dream Theater, just announced adding tracks to Jammit’s database, calling it, “Deconstructing Dream Theater.” Other notable names like: Rush, Motley Crue, Maroon 5, Foo Fighters and many others, across different genres, are listed in the download library, sortable by which ever instrument track you want to learn. Moreover, Jammit is offering the original master recordings; not remixes or otherwise changed versions of the songs. When you preview a song for purchase on the site, short videos play and show the song in action.

Lastly, the conceivable endgame is that you download, practice, perfect and then share the recording you’ve made. If you’ve always said you could do better than the drummer from Dream Theater and just never had the backing of the rest of the group to prove it, you can put your recorded performance back into the full mix with everyone else, sans the real drummer, and then unleash it on your Facebook page for all the world to hear or email it to your drum teacher for that big hint that you want more technical work. While you’re learning the song, music can even be displayed in score, tablature or waveform format.

Here’s an in-depth display of the power in the virtual mixing board, shown in context, from Jammit’s website. Along with these diagrams, a demonstration video is below. Altogether, Jammit seems like a strong blending of solid recording/editing/teaching power with the feel of a fun Rock Band expansion pack on top.

Jammit – How It Works

Kira is an old school music nerd with a love for all things creative; always searching for music’s common ground. She graduated with an M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University. Drop her a tweet @shadowmelody1