Being an occasional wannabe musician who is trying to write just the one one-hit-wonder in my lifetime so as to ensure an easy existence of living off the ensuing royalties, I love my guitar. It’s a Maton EM225C acoustic electric with a lovely bright sound and great fret action. So when news of Jam Sessions came through with its promise of being a "portable guitar" and a "songwriter’s companion" I thought hey why not! Whatever teeny bopper pop crap I eventually come up with, it can’t be worse than Avril Lavigne’s "Sk8r Boi" – and that sold millions! Now that that’s out of the way, here is a review where I unfairly compare a real guitar to the DS version…but hey if it’s meant to be a guitar simulator then the least I could do is assess this claim.

 

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Comfort

Given it’s digit-intensive requirements and the pain barrier of steel strings, a non-nylon string guitar takes a lot of getting used to never mind just being able to hold one comfortably. But after the drawing of blood via barbed wire fingertip action, once you’ve built up your calluses and learnt bar chords then there’s no problem.

8/10

Unfortunately the DS is already quite uncomfortable, particularly with games where you need to use the d-pad, the XYAB buttons AND the shoulder buttons. Compared to a real guitar though (and subtracting such hand contorting difficulties) a DS is much easier to pick up. There’s no such thing as DS callus development as far as I’m aware (although shooting turtle shells in Mario Kart does initially provoke an ‘electrical’ feeling through the hand nerves). On that note I do have thumb calluses from years of analogue stick use, but that’s another story. (Hey a ‘next blog’ idea: The physical results of gaming!)

5/10

 

Chords

Getting your hand and fingers ready for your very first jump from an open chord to a bar chord is one of the trickiest but most rewarding aspects of playing a real guitar. As is wooing chicks by singing to them at night, but again that’s another story. But not a blog idea oh no, 1up does not need to hear about that.

7/10

JS has a decent range of chords (but rather disappointingly, not ALL the common chords and you can’t make custom ones either), and allows you to simply hold down different directional buttons to change from whatever crazy chord you want to any other even more crazy hand-spasm-inducing chord without the hassle of physically doing it, but requiring a great deal of experimentation which may be too intimidating for those with little or no knowledge of music theory (no there’s no such thing as a bloody ‘H’ note, it’s an ‘A’ again fool!!) So whilst it is much easier on a DS, the diagonal button assignments don’t always register as smoothly as you may like them to and holding the left shoulder button for more chord options doesn’t work that great either.

6/10

 

Fingerpicking

Guitar players are usually divided into those who like chords or those who like to fingerpick, and of course those who do both – often at the same time (showoffs: watching someone like Tommy Emmanuel can easily destroy one’s confidence in ever aspiring to become a good guitar player. I’d own that punk in Pro Evo though. Bitter bitter). Fingerpicking (or "plucking" if you want, although when I say that word it always makes me think of a duck) is definitely a worthy art, and songs like Tears in Heaven and Blackbird are nice examples worth learning in real life, if only to close your eyes while playing.

9/10

Non existent! I can see why it wasn’t featured as it would raise the confusion level of the game for beginners about ten-fold, but even a watered-down option would’ve been welcome. So no portable ‘Clapton on the bus’ joy to be had here which is a damn shame, even if it just means not having an excuse to pull off the glasses and beard combo look.

0/10

 

Custom chords

If you ever feel like straying from traditional chords, then just make them up! As long as it sounds good eh, and a real guitar gives you an infinite number of possibilities to bend your fingers in as painful a way as you can.

10/10

A big disappointment here, maybe my biggest disappointment with JS, is that there are no custom chords allowed. My vision of filling out one those little chord grids was dashed almost straight away upon loading the application up, but then the reason for this omission is similar to why there is no fingerpicking option either given all the individual notes and the difficulty in DS’ing those controls.

0/10

 

Portability

Lugging a guitar around with you can be annoying, especially when you have to get on buses and walking through impatient city crowds. Plus you will need a case, which means if you didn’t get one with your guitar then you’ll have to buy a separate fabric-made one or those chunky black hard cases (which for some reason reminds me of a PS3, weird).

5/10

 

Nothing says "I Love You" more than having a DS Lite in your trouser pocket.

10/10

 

Capo

The capo allows you to clamp a funny looking, well, clamp thing onto any fret on the guitar in order to raise the key of whatever you play, i.e. you play any chord as it would normally be played but because it is in a different key it will become a different chord name and sound accordingly different. It’s an essential device, without which such songs like Here Comes the Sun would not have been written in the way (or key) in which they were. Adjust it to match your singing voice and strain that diaphragm hard when hitting the high F# in your Mariah Carey cover set.

10/10

 

A ‘virtual capo’ exists here where you can raise or lower the key of your DS chord arrangement, but herein lies a problem: the chord names will change accordingly. Real guitar is mainly all about shapes, and shapes are much easier to remember than learning music theory again (because you didn’t pay attention in music class because the air conditioning was on too high and it was cold and the teacher was just playing piano for the whole 50 minutes. Am I revealing too much?). I’ll use a gaming analogy: tetris blocks are much easier to comprehend than if you were just watching lines of programming code flowing down Matrix-style, that’s what I think of music theory. Yes: Joe Pantoliano’s goatee.

2/10

 

Hammer-ons/offs

The cool-sounding name of the technique whereby guitarists can add all sorts of effects to their music by applying/letting go of individual strings during the ‘ringing’ of a strummed chord (examples: Norwegian Wood and Tears in Heaven again) and NOT what the electricity buttons in MC Hammer’s house are called. Wait, isn’t that a twisted version of one of those Chuck Norris facts? Cool-sounding in name and cool-sounding in nature, except when that twat Tommy Emmanuel does it.

10/10

 Nope, but I won’t be too harsh on the DS here given how it is impossible to incorporate this onto a handheld console without resorting to crazy StarFox Command-like complexities.

5/10

 

Strumming

Strumming down is easy enough, it’s just when strumming up comes into it that things get tricky and a lot harder than it may look on our pear-shaped friend. Again it takes getting used to but once perfected is very rewarding despite all those picks/plectrums you drop into the hole of the guitar whilst first trying it out. Tip: to extract the pick just turn your guitar so that the hole is facing down and shake it like crazy.

9/10

JS lets you strum up and down with the stylus (or a pick/plectrum if you REALLY want to look like an idiot on the bus) with relative ease, albeit in a diagonal across-the-screen direction. But because of the lack of any individual strings the sound doesn’t come across that great, plus it is difficult/nigh-on impossible to get a fast strumming rhythm going in order to play stuff like Wonderwall. Almost as difficult/nigh-on impossible as it would be trying to get your voice to sound as whiny as Liam Gallagher’s really.

5/10

 

Sound

If you’ve tuned your real guitar up and have nice new shiny strings, the sound of a guitar sure is wonderful. However if you are like me and regularly add a few flats/sharps here and there (it’s my style ok) then…not so good.

10/10

JS was touted as having a really authentic sound to it, but I have to disagree here. The sound of the chords seem very artificial to me, and because of the aforementioned problems in hitting your diagonal d-pad assigned chords a lot of continuity in your song is lost and you just end up with a lot of those blunted string sounds, meaning that you might have to end up factoring those in like the intro of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit or KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and the Cherry Tree. Well if JS leads to there being more of those sorts of musicians coming through, then it’s not all that bad actually. It is cool though how you can add on various effects and distortion, but even though you can record your compositions you CAN’T sing into the mic as an accompaniment! I’ve already shouted out stuff on the bus like "Objection!" into the DS, so singing into one can’t be that bad right? Eric Clapton does it all the time.

6/10

 

Power Playing

Strum as hard as you can until you break a string, you know you want to. Just to know what it feels like. And I tell you, it feels good. Not if the string recoils and hits you in the left eye, but the POWER is there.

10/10

The DS touch screen detects pressure only slightly for this purpose, but unfortunately the effects aren’t that great. Actually they are pretty insignificant but it sure beats a cracked DS screen recoiling and hitting you in the right eye. So, sadly, no option on JS for giving your song "emotion" or using it as an outlet for pent-up teen angst.

5/10

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Final Score

A bloody long read wasn’t it? Unless you just skipped straight to this final summary here. Overall, according to this biased review, a real guitar is worth double the value of owning Jam Sessions (actually it’s a lot more, but surely reviewers shouldn’t be allowed to just go back and alter their earlier points so that it looks better overall, right?). It was a decent idea by Ubisoft but their claims of being a real guitar simulator and a handy tool for musicians and beginners alike is not entirely correct given that both sets of players will find issues with it, and it’s these problems that ultimately prevent it from being a must-own application. Handy? Yes. As good as it could have been? No. Definitely try this before you buy – in the meantime I’m going to either resell my copy or trade it in. Anyone interested? Thought not.