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Looper's Delight
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>Travis mentioned that he would rather see money spent on the feature set > >than on the interface. While I agree with the sentiment, I must admit >that I have been very frustrated with the limited user interface of the >JamMan, particularly the display. We've had tons of feature suggestions >but getting advanced features into the box usually means you have >parameters to tweek. How do you display BPM on a box like the JamMan. >Good luck. The bottom line is, you don't want to blow the budget on the >user interface but you have to be not careful to put in too little. If you want to display BPM, you have to have a numerical readout, there's no two ways about it. As far as improving the interface on future JamMan, I'd suggest something like the the Zoom 508 uses. It has a two character display with about 10 dots that come on to indicate the status of different modes. Some of the display messages appear in the form of scrolling text, and I was surprised at how much info they managed to cram into two alphanumeric characters and a few dots. If you've got something as powerful as the JamMan, I think you really need to put more on the front panel, and yes, raise the price a little. Jon, can you give an estimate as to how much it would have added to the JamMan list to physically add in a simple LED display (not factoring in the additional R&D time to tweak the interface to take advantage of the increased info bandwidth)? The Echoplex was about $300 more than the JamMan, and seemed to have about $300 more stuff, more features, and more display info on the front panel. However, that $300 seemed to be the breaking point for a lot of people, it was just too much for them to drop, even people who were already fairly loop-aware. I said this before in mail to Motley, and I don't think it's a stunning revelation, but I think that selling looping devices to the masses requires in-store demo's of how to use the thing. I play tapes for people of the live looping stuff I've done, and they think it's four or five people playing--they may like the music, but the "magic trick" nature of looping is invisible on tape. If you have a musician show another musician how to use one of the Big Three, I'd say your chance of selling them a box goes up five-fold. This requires someone who can adequately demo the product (which consists of more than playing some riff haphazardly into the loop and hitting "hold" and then saying "Now you can solo over it!") and answer questions. This isn't going to happen unless the manufacturer pays someone to go on a tour of dealers doing clinics. Perhaps an instructional video tape, for $5 to interested parties? Travis Hartnett