IN ONE OF MY FAVORITE quotes from Lewis Carroll's Through
the Looking Glass, the White Queen declares, “The rule
is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam
today.” That's almost how I felt while testing
Boss's JamStation JS-5, a band-in-a-box synthesizer that plays a
wide range of preprogrammed MIDI musical styles at the touch of a
button and has a built-in 1-track digital audio recorder.
Designed primarily for novice guitar players and shower-stall
vocalists, the machine could potentially provide a sweet and tasty
musical topping for the dry toast of tedious daily practice.
Unfortunately, its unintuitive interface and limited usefulness
left me feeling unsatisfied today.
Boss is also marketing the box as a backing machine, for
plugging into a guitar amp or P.A. and accompanying performers
while they sing and play. The advantages of using virtual musicians
are obvious: you get a wide range of instruments, loading at the
gig is easy, the drummer never loses a beat, the piano player never
shows up drunk, everyone's always on time, and they'll play all
night for free. But the little guys who live inside the JS-5 are
hard to talk to and sometimes difficult to work with.
The JamStation JS-5 is approximately the size and shape of a
desk telephone, but don't let its small size fool you. A lot of
sound is contained in this little machine, and you can record even
more by storing original audio and MIDI data on removable
SmartMedia cards.
A SOUND AND LIGHT SHOW
The JS-5 has 50 buttons on its surface, as well as a rotary
dial, two volume knobs, and an LCD/LED display area. On the back
you'll find an on/off switch, MIDI I/O ports (see Fig. 1),
stereo audio output, mono audio input (with a gain switch to select
line, mic, or guitar levels), a footswitch jack, and a headphone
miniplug. The buttons are big and tactile and boldly labeled, and
almost half of them glow bright red. You even get a cute little
light show as the buttons flash in cascading sequence while the
unit powers up.
Most of the buttons perform double duty. On the left side of the
box, the square buttons select musical styles in one mode and chord
types in the other. The round buttons, just above, control song
forms and key changes. The right side of the unit contains controls
for transport and looping, part muting, and tempo, as well as
various buttons for editing songs and setting myriad
user-modifiable parameters. The big LED indicates the bar of the
song that's playing, while the smaller LCD shows the song name,
musical style, chord type, recording information, and other
settings, depending on the selected mode.
The JS-5 includes 200 preset songs (elements of which you can
use as building blocks for your own arrangements) divided into 13
categories, including rock, blues, ballad, jazz, R&B, country,
and Latin, with an additional 100 slots available for original
songs in an internal user bank or stored on removable media. The
styles consist of MIDI arrangements for four instruments —
Drums, Bass, Inst1 (usually guitar), and Inst2 (usually keyboard)
— although you also have access to a range of other sounds,
such as horns and strings.
Each song consists of two tracks: the Form Track, which assigns
phrases of preset length to certain bars (that is, bar 1 equals a
4-bar Intro, bar 5 equals an 8-bar Verse1, and so forth); and the
Chord Track, which assigns a chord, such as C7 or F#m7(b5), to
every bar. You may also record an audio track, but only for songs
in the User or Card banks, and the amount of available memory
limits their length.
INITIAL REACTIONS
The first thing I did upon unpacking the JS-5 was to fire up the
demo song, a raucous rock tune that sounded to me like the '80s
band Heart on a really bad hair day. Maybe I'm not the target
audience here; nonetheless, the demo is a bit deceptive. Although
you can record vocal and guitar tracks in sync with the
MIDI accompaniments, only one audio track is available per song.
The unit provides no mixing or overdubbing capabilities, yet the
demo's audio track contains both guitar and vocals, mixed with
reverb and delay.
The JS-5 does offer various multi-effects for the MIDI tracks,
but you can't apply these to the audio. (One effect you can apply
is Timestretch, a feature that changes the tempo of the audio to
match any bpm adjustments you make in the MIDI tracks. Although it
does work, even a small tempo change results in discernible audio
artifacts.)
Next, I auditioned the various preset songs to see just what
kinds of tracks the JS-5 could produce. I have to give its
designers high marks for including a wide range of musical styles.
The preset list offers a veritable short course in popular music
over the last 50 years, with an emphasis on current genres. To
Roland's credit, the parts are not all completely quantized, so
they have a more human feel. The samples are familiar Roland
JV1080-type sounds, generally appropriate for the various musical
styles the box emulates.
However, I found using the JS-5's button-heavy interface and
navigating the many levels of features confusing and frustrating.
The lack of an Undo button means that it's possible to make
irreversible mistakes, and more than once I accidentally messed up
songs that I was working on. The manual seems to have lost
something in the translation to English (surprise!), making the
JS-5's functions even more difficult to learn.
ORIGINAL SONGS?
The unit contains a mode called EZ Compose that's designed to
walk you through the steps required to create your own song. If you
follow the instructions meticulously, you can program an original
composition by selecting a preset style, a tempo, a root key, and
one of 50 different Chord Templates, which generate chord
progressions. The Chord Templates are divided into three
categories: Major, Minor, and Blues.
Unfortunately, nowhere does the JS-5 tell you what your chosen
chord progression actually is — not in the manual
and not when you select the template. The only way to determine
what the chart looks like is to put the display in Chord mode and
step through the bars of the song after you've created it.
Therefore, your ability to pick an appropriate chord structure for
your song or edit it to fit your needs is severely limited.
Modifying songs isn't easy, either. Though you can change each
bar's chord and form settings, the process is tedious and the
interface difficult to read, particularly in Step mode. In fact,
the first time I saw the Step Recording screen for chords, I had to
check the manual to make sure the incomprehensible symbols it
displayed weren't indicating a system malfunction.
Also disappointing was the musically flawed design of the Form
track. The Form buttons are labeled (in order) Intro, Verse1,
Fill1, Verse2, Fill2, Break1, Break2, and Ending. Where are the
Bridge and Chorus buttons? Most if not all of the presets follow
the same form: a 4-bar Intro, followed by a Verse with a few chord
changes, a 1-bar Fill going into a second Verse that has a
variation of some sort, followed by an Ending. It's as if the
designers of this box had never heard of the AABA song form.
GET WITH THE PROGRAMMING
Not surprisingly, AABA is exactly the form of the New
Orleans-style song I recorded to test out the unit. After
struggling with the EZ interface and selecting the Cajun Funk style
from the R&B bank, I used the RealTime recording mode to enter
the chords by tapping the right buttons at the appropriate times.
This wasn't as easy as it sounds, and I was using only three
chords: C7, F7, and G7. It took a number of tries, and even then I
had to edit the chords and forms in Step mode. The one thing I
never did figure out was how to insert two beats of silence at the
end of each A section.
Then I plugged a microphone into the JamStation's audio input,
using a cord with an XLR-to-¼-inch impedance adapter, and
recorded my vocal part while playing along with the JS-5 on the
piano. I asked a guitarist friend to come by and lay down a guitar
solo on the bridge. We replaced the microphone with a Strat and
changed the gain switch to Guitar. On the JS-5, rerecording a
section means first erasing what is already there, so I copied the
song to another slot on a 16MB SmartMedia card and erased my piano
playing during the bridge. I then used the JamStation's punch-I/O
feature to record the guitarist's solo.
Overall, I found the process of creating my own song —
with my own form and chord structure — pretty difficult. The
JamStation also allows you to record your own MIDI data for custom
styles, but this process seemed even more arcane to me than
recording audio. (For one thing, to make the chord-change
algorithms work correctly, you have to enter all of the harmonic
data in the key of C major.)
I did enjoy playing with the JamStation JS-5 in a number of
different ways. I've always kept a drum machine next to the piano
for use as a high-tech metronome and compositional aid. By soloing
the drum part and looping a single verse, the JS-5 can function as
a preprogrammed timekeeper. Having so many styles to jam along with
can also provide inspiration for songwriting. You can change chords
on the fly — from major to minor to augmented — while a
song is playing, which I found interesting from a music-education
and ear-training point of view (although the usually nonexistent
voice leading caused odd harmonic jumps between changes).
As for using the JS-5 to provide backing tracks for a live gig,
any General MIDI unit with a sequencer in it would probably be a
lot more efficient and practical. Due to obvious copyright issues
the JS-5 doesn't come with any recognizable songs programmed into
it, so you'd have to program every song yourself — and given
the interface's constraints, that would require a great deal of
time and effort.
FINAL ANALYSIS
My overall impression is that despite all its features, the
JamStation JS-5's programming limitations make it more suitable for
entry-level users than as a professional tool. It might best serve
as a starter kit for people who just want to get their feet wet
with computer-generated sounds.
Peter Drescher is a composer and piano player and the owner
of Twittering Machine, a project studio located in San
Francisco.
JAMSTATION JS-5 SPECS
Audio Outputs (2) ¼" TRS (stereo)
Audio Input (1) ¼" (mono)
Additional Ports MIDI I/O; ¼" TRS footswitch jack;
stereo ¼" minijack headphone output
Polyphony 32 notes
Instruments 128, plus 16 drum kits
ROM/User RAM Programs 200/100
Removable Storage SmartMedia cards
Available Audio Recording Time internal: 2 minutes;
external (via optional SmartMedia cards): 1 hour
Effects Reverb and Chorus (on MIDI parts only)
Dimensions 10.5" (L) × 7" (H) × 2.5" (D)
Weight 2.4 lbs.
Power Supply 14VAC adapter
PRODUCT SUMMARY
Boss
JamStation JS-5
$599
Overall Rating (1 through 5): 2.5
PROS: Wide range of preset musical styles. Useful tool
for practice. Fun for freeform jamming. Audio-recording
capabilities.
CONS: Arcane and unmusical programming interface.
Poorly conceived song formats. No Undo function. Inadequate
documentation.
Contact:
Roland Corporation U.S.; tel. (323) 890-3700; Web www.rolandus.com
