Rayzoon Technologies LLC

sharke_ · Jammer Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 21

I'm just going to come out and say it...while I love Jamstix and its potential for creating amazing drum tracks, the documentation for this software is inadequate to say the least. It took me a LONG time to get to grips with Jamstix and even now after a few months I still feel like I'm not quite sure how it works. I've read the manual 4 times now Shocked

And onto Jamcussion. I bought this a while ago and gave the manual a quick read and quickly realized that it does an absolutely terrible job of explaining how it works. First of all it's dated as 2008 and obviously Jamstix has moved on a lot since then. Showing screenshots of Jamstix 2 is confusing to begin with. Secondly, what information about how Jamcussion kits work is scant and baffling.

For instance, I look at the list of Jamcussion kits available in the kit menu. Two of the kits are "Empty Kit" and "Empty Kit + Percussion." There is absolutely no mention of what these are for in the manual. If I load the Empty Kit, I get a blank screen with no drums. This is expected. If I load "Empty Kit + Percussion," which shows a list of elements including chimes, cowbell, egg shaker etc, again I get a blank screen with nothing. If "Empty Kit + Percussion" pertains to Jamstix and not Jamcussion, then why is it in the kit menu for Jamcussion?

But the confusion doesn't end there. Let's say I want to use a Battery kit for my percussion. I've had great success with sending Jamstix MIDI to Battery so I want to do the same with Jamcussion. I want to choose a limited selection of percussion instruments and have Jamcussion play those for me. What is the correct procedure? Should I select "Empty Kit" and then just add the elements I want one by one by selecting "Add to kit"?

Well, let's try that. I'm presented with a menu which offers "Drum 1," "Drum 2" etc, and also "Perc 1," "Perc 2" and onward. What is the difference between "Drum" and "Perc"? The manual does not make this clear. I get that drums have more sound types, but the list of instruments available for "Drum" slots is the same as for "Perc." For instance, I can load a triangle, which only has two sounds "main" and "alternate" in the perc slot, into a drum slot, where I'm presented with Drum 2, Medium, Rim and Muted, which obviously don't apply to this triangle.

But aside from this confusion, something strange happens when I continue adding elements to this empty kit. If I add an element and then set it to "MIDI output only," when I add another element then the first one will disappear. Is this a bug? I've also worked out that if I add my own elements and then select "set all to MIDI output only," then Jamcussion will send MIDI notes that I haven't assigned to the output, whereas if I select "set to MIDI output only" on a per-drum basis, it will only send out those sounds. Again, stuff like this should be explained in the manual.

All in all, I guess I was expecting to be able to just route Jamcussion to some weird and wonderful electronic Battery kits and have the percussionists play a certain set of sounds in rhythms that I can have some kind of fine control over. And while I seem to have managed to achieve that in Jamstix, it seems to be virtually impossible to get the same kind of results in Jamcussion, at least from reading the manual and experimenting anyway. I get the feeling that the role of Jamcussion, far more than Jamstix, is to play its own included sounds in a limited set of styles, which are heavily weighted toward African/Latin genres. Why is there no option to load a GM percussion kit for instance? This would be invaluable.

I absolutely love Jamstix and I want to love Jamcussion, but after long and hard experimentation I just haven't been able to get the kind of results I was looking for. After spending a lot of money on these programs it would be nice to get a more user-friendly experience with some clear, thorough documentation. Instead I'm just confused and depressed Sad

Sorry I couldn't be more positive.

Ralph [RZ] · Site Admin Joined: 02 Jan 2008 Posts: 13332

You are absolutely right, the manual needs a lot of attention. Sorry about that!

sharke_ · Jammer Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 21

Hi Ralph, thanks for your reply. What I meant was that if I start with an empty kit, add say 3 elements, map them to 3 sounds in my drum VST and then select "set all to MIDI output only," when I start playback, I notice that Jamcussion is not only playing those three sounds in my VST but also other sounds as well. In other words, it's sending out additional MIDI notes as well as the three that I've mapped.

On the other hand, if I select "set to MIDI output only" for each drum individually, then Jamcussion will only send out MIDI for those drums (which is what I want). Let me know if you're seeing this at your end - if not, I will do some more testing.

With regards to the manual, sorry for my harsh comments, I'm just one of those people who likes to eventually sit down with the documentation for a VST and learn the thing thoroughly until I know exactly how it works! With Jamcussion, it's kind of like the manual gives you a few vague clues and you have to work out how it works by trial and error. I found it very easy to get some amazing sounding percussion going right off the bat, but not so easy to tweak that percussion for my own songs.