by Most guitar slingers tend to pick up the instrument and start emulating their favorite musicians, learning how to play by example and sheer brute effort. While this approach is valid, it tends to lead axe-wielders towards certain chord shapes, and limit the kind of music that emerges from the fingers doing the comfortable trip up and down the neck. Jamn is an innovative app that brings some much-needed musical theory to the fretboard, helping to figure out how chords connect with each other and thus lead the way to a more substantial range of musical possibilities.
When you open Jamn, you’re presented with a pair of choices: a visual chord database, plus the main event, the inelegantly-named “Multi-Tool” – a circular chord arrangement view designed to teach you about the relationship between different chords, scales, and the dynamics of major/minor tonalities. The overall idea is that certain progressions of chords tend to sound harmonious, and work well for modern pop-oriented songwriting.
You essentially pick your root chord – the foundation on which you will sequence other complementary chords – by dialing it into the top position on the wheel. At that point, the rest of the wheel displays chords that work well with the root in both major and minor scales. You can also instantly transpose chords, which made us wish there was some sort of chord sequencer in the app. Guitarists will totally appreciate the clear tab displays of selected chords, and while the MIDI-based guitar playback sounds are OK, they leave a little to be desired in some of the more subtle note interactions in complex chords.
Perhaps the biggest “gotcha” of Jamn is that you’ll need to have a slightly more-than-basic grasp of musical theory in order to make sense of the content, and those who are already constructing chord progressions in their heads are likely to find Jamn a bit simplistic for their level; the balance here is right on the edge. And the built-in instrument tuner is essentially useless, proving less accurate than some free options we’ve used. It feels like an afterthought and sadly performs like one.
The basic app – with limited scales, and only the guitar – is priced at $0.99, while it’ll cost you $3.99 to unlock the rest of the instruments (banjo, bass, and piano), plus the full range of chords. We loved the ability to instantly match a guitar chord with the appropriate notes on a piano, or a bass guitar, which makes the in-app purchase pretty worthwhile.
The bottom line. For about $5 overall, Jamn is a solid educational reference for guitarists looking to expand their understanding of musical theory.
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