Jam Sessions Review

Avid gamers, the bitter truth is: guitars win girls, not Halo skills. Luckily for you (and me, I’ll admit), there’s something that can help. And no, it’s not Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is about playing along to somebody else’s music (which is admittedly pretty cool). Jam Sessions is about giving you the freedom to create your own music. In that sense, Jam Sessions is not a game. But– but– but– Yeah, I know, the DS is a game system. Similar to Electroplankton, though, the less you think about it as a game, the more you will get out of it.

While Jam Sessions has included songs that you can read and attempt to play, you don’t get scored on your performance. They are just there to help you understand how the tool works. On the bottom screen, there is a single string to strum with the stylus. This produces a chord depending on which direction you hold on the D-pad (or which buttons you hold if you’re left-handed). This gives you a mere eight chords at a time, but you can tap a shoulder button to switch to a second set of eight. That makes it sound like the game only contains 16 chords in all, but those are just the readily available chords. There are many more to choose from: flats, sharps, chords with 7’s and m’s by them. Look, I’m not pretending to know the guitar, okay?

Along with the impressive amount of chords, the sound quality of the guitar is very crisp and authentic. This sounds pretty close to the real thing and should become a valuable asset for music artists. The downside, unfortunately, is that it’s an acoustic guitar. Acoustic guitars are cool and all, but my love is electric. There are effects you can add, like distortion and flange, that will get you to something close. It just ends up sounding really compressed and cheap.

What’s nice about these effects, though, is that you can save several different presets and easily switch between them. Jam Sessions does what Electroplankton was too chicken to do and lets you save a lot of the things you can tweak. For instance, if you don’t like the default chord pallets, you can make (and store) your own to get the chords you want on the same screen together. Above all, you can record onto the cart a handful of your own songs. Even better, when you replay them, the game shows you what chords you used and when. So you can go back and listen to your summer jam and re-learn it if need be.

Jam Sessions makes for an awesome guitar and a great accompaniment to other music tools (like Electroplankton), but it has one striking omission: you can’t pluck individual strings. Chords can take you a long way, but there are so many times when I really wanted to hit separate notes and couldn’t. It’s strange that Jam Sessions, which wants to be a professional guitar simulator, doesn’t do this when Hannah Montana: Music Jam does. Wait, what? You seriously let Hannah Montana do that over you? For shame.

Final Comments

I can’t stress this enough: Jam Sessions is not a game. What it is… is a guitar that only costs $30 and fits in your pocket. It’s best to have some foreknowledge of how to play a guitar to really take advantage of Jam Sessions, but it’s also pretty easy for amateurs to pick up. The important thing is: if you love to make music and are particularly interested in the experimental music scene, this game (whoops, I mean tool) is a must-have.