RE: Improving looper interfaces

["T.W. Hartnett" <hartnett.t@apple.com>]

>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