Jammit offers a cool idea at its core — to help people learn to play certain songs by isolating the individual instrumental music tracks — but the idea isn’t enough to hold back the frustration of mega micropayments that fuel the app.
Before you sign up on Jammit, you can preview how the process works with a song by the band Rush. You can see that you can look at sheet music for the song, and you can play a snippet that lets you isolate the different guitar tracks in the app. It’s a cool concept, so you sign up.
What you find out rather quickly is that the free Rush song is now gone, and you have a store at your disposal that lets you purchase a smattering of other songs, ranging in genre from nu-metal to softer top 40 rock ’n’ roll, for the outrageous price of $3.99 a song. Perhaps there is a world somewhere in which people would pay $3.99 to isolate the guitar tracks on P.O.D.’s “Alive,” or George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” but I’m absolutely sure this isn’t that world.
That’s kind of a shame because it seems like the app would be beneficial in teaching people how to play their favorite songs. I’m not sure whether that would translate into increasing your overall skill at guitar, but certainly it’s easier to understand how a guitar track sounds when you don’t have to strain to hear it over the vocals, bass and drums.
If Jammit gets its head on straight and lowers the song prices, this app might be worth a second look. Until then, the bang for your buck simply doesn’t translate.
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