 JamHub Rehearsal System Creates New Market ...Massachusetts-based BreezSong LLC, could represent enormous potential at a time when good news is in seriously short supply. Consider the following:
• The most frequently cited reason for the success of “school of rock”-type band camps, group lessons on piano and other instruments, and, of course, public school music programs, is “Playing with others is a lot more fun than playing alone.”
• The number-one reason for purchasing electronic drums, recently the brightest corner of the percussion market, is to be able to play without disturbing neighbors or family members.
• In our ultra-busy society, one of the most commonly referenced reasons for not playing in a band is “I can’t fit it into my schedule.”
Now consider the sales and market-building implications of a series of products that facilitates the fun of jamming in a band, at any hour, without disturbing others.
A native of Portland, Maine, JamHub inventor Steve Skillings started playing guitar when he was 16. (His mom let his band rehearse in his basement.) Realizing he wasn’t going to become rich or famous as a guitarist, he enrolled in Clarkson University, a top-10 engineering school in Potsdam, New York. In the late ’80s he began learning about manufacturing while working with Toyota. After earning his MBA from Portland (Oregon) State University he returned to the East Coast to join the product development and marketing teams at Bose, where he ended up working on the company’s landmark L1 portable line array speakers. Throughout all his educational and career pursuits he played in bands.
Skillings’ JamHub epiphany came to him when he learned that his son’s friend was allowed to rehearse with his band for just one hour a week while his duplex-sharing neighbors were away. Incited to “engineering mode,” Skillings began pondering the problem, but initially assumed “there’s just too big a need” for it not to be addressed by an existing product. But after much research he determined that this huge, obvious need for invention had yet to be realized or patented.
When Skillings debuted the first JamHub prototype, $700 worth of mixers, cables, sundry parts, and wires soldered into boxes and jury-rigged onto a 2' x 4' piece of plywood, his bandmates were skeptical, to say the least. But when they plugged in their instruments (including the drummer’s electronic kit) and headphones and began to play, they were blown away by the sound’s clarity and comfortable overall volume, and each player was thrilled with having control over his own mix.
“Rehearsing with standard rock ’n’ roll instrumentation in a small room, even with a small amp—never mind a half-stack—is really a bad idea—but it’s what we had to do,” says Skillings. “Our ears are like microphones; they can only handle so much SPL before they start to ‘clip.’ In an attempt to hear your own instrument or vocals over the others, everyone starts turning up, and before long you’ve got a ‘volume war’ raging, and clarity goes out the window. One of the key benefits of the JamHub is that musicians can rehearse nearly silently, and everyone in the band can decide their own mix. Volume wars are gone.”
At that first trial, the band members’ spouses, hanging out upstairs, were also very pleased, signaling JamHub’s other major benefit: enabling musicians living in urban apartments, college dorms, with young families or unappreciative neighbors—to rehearse at any hour of the day or night—without having to pay steep rehearsal studio hourly rates. Skillings quips, “The JamHub experience is that you can play at ‘11,’ but the world hears you at ‘1.’”
JamHubs are available in three models: BedRoom, GreenRoom, and TourBus, with street prices of $299.99, $499.99, and $699.99, respectively. The basic functions are identical among the models.
The BedRoom model has five sections (for up to five musicians or combinations of musicians/iPod/CD player/metronome/etc.)—1-4 plus R. Skillings explains that people orient themselves to the JamHub’s semi-circle layout, with its rear R section, much faster than they did with fully round prototypes. Why not a rectangle? “A lot of musicians get lost in the matrix-design of standard 15-plus-channel mixers; they tend to fumble with quick, small adjustments. The JamHub’s layout clearly delineates each player’s ‘territory,’ so their adjustments can be made with minimal thought and interruption of their playing.”
Each section has a stereo headphone output and three audio channels: microphone, instrument left, and instrument right. Skillings and his band immediately discovered that using stereo instrument sounds facilitates a very fun and satisfying rehearsal experience that can place players in the middle of such effects as a ping-pong delayed guitar or synth, a keyboard’s “huge Hammond patch with a big, swirling Leslie,” or a wide-panned electronic drumkit. Instrument and mic inputs have input trim controls, and the headphone output has a volume control. The SoleMix region of each section includes separate volume controls for sections 1-R, a Stage (pan) control that adjusts the section’s placement in the stereo image, and an Effect knob for adjusting the amount of effect returned to each section/player’s headphones. A rotary knob selects from among 16 digital effects including eight reverbs, two delays, plus chorus, phaser, flanger, and reverse delay effects. The effect choice is applied globally to all sections’ mic (not instrument) inputs, although the amount of the chosen effect returned to each player’s section is independently adjustable. A 1/R slide switch selects between those two sections’ mixes to facilitate convenient monitoring of a distinct recording mix created with the R section. The BedRoom model has one input for an optional SoleMix remote, which has volume knobs for each section plus master headphone mix and effects return controls. The SoleMix remote is typically used by the drummer or other musician whose access to the JamHub is limited.
Skillings jokes that the entry-level BedRoom model is “the best product in a music store for a mom and dad” because it affordably buys them some peace and quiet! For beginners, the JamHub also eliminates what he calls the “big sister factor,” where the big sister or brother comes into the basement and tells the aspiring musicians, “You guys stink!” “Kids—and adults—just starting on an instrument can be intimidated by what others think of their playing,” he suggests. Using a JamHub, beginners can get past that potentially delicate stage of their development in productively “safe” sequestration.
The GreenRoom model has all the capability of the BedRoom but further offers seven sections—1-6 plus R—four remote inputs, and comes with one SoleMix remote. The GreenRoom also adds phantom power for condenser mics and a USB output, which facilitates recording the R section mix to a computer. “In mixer terms,” Skillings comments, the GreenRoom is sort of like a 21-channel, seven-stereo-bus mixer—for $500.”
The flagship TourBus model tops the GreenRoom by including two SoleMix remotes, a metronome, and a digital recorder that can write the mix assigned to the R section as CD-quality (16-bit/44.1kHZ) .WAV files to an SD RAM card. (A 4GB card is included, but the JamHub will accommodate all current-generation cards.)
TourBus is designed for larger bands and touring musicians—hence the name. Skillings has already heard from touring players who, lamenting all their downtime on the road, say the TourBus would enable them to rehearse and develop new material in their hotel rooms. If all of the sections and all four SoleMix remote outputs are used, the TourBus (and GreenRoom) can create a maximum of 11 unique mixes.
JamHub prices aren’t the only things that are compact; even the TourBus, with its prodigious functionality, can fit into a backpack or laptop computer bag.
D’Addario President Rick Drumm told Skillings, “Steve, the music industry is great at creating tennis rackets, but we’re bad at creating tennis courts. JamHub could be our ‘tennis court’.” Drumm’s compliment reinforces Skillings’ larger vision for the JamHub. The BreezSong founder believes that JamHub can help create a new rehearsal sub-market for retailers. For example, his drummer doesn’t sing, and so until recently he never had a reason to own a microphone. Using the JamHub, with everyone wearing headphones, it’s important for him to have a mic, stand, and cable to be able to conveniently communicate with his bandmates as they’re playing. More obviously, for the fully silent JamHub rehearsal studio, the band needs electronic drums, and guitarists may want to buy effects or amp/cabinet modelers that produce a driven-amp sound without an amp.
Also, musicians who use a JamHub will be more inclined to keep playing because a) they’re having more fun playing with other people than playing alone and b) their bands sound better because JamHub enables them to rehearse longer, more often, and in more situations, and to hear things they’ve never heard before.
Skillings explains, “We’re hoping that retailers will not only say, ‘We’re going to make money selling JamHubs,’ but also ‘We’re going to make money giving lessons on being in a band and arranging tunes for a band,’ because with JamHub their teachers can give lessons to a whole rock band in their lesson rooms without disrupting their store’s business. We want to see JamHubs drive more store traffic.”
He concludes, “If a JamHub can create more active musicians, they’re going to play more, they’re going to break more strings, seek more sounds, lose more picks, want new straps, buy more books…. If we do a good job of developing the silent rehearsal studio concept, we could raise entry-level, once-a-month players up a notch so that they play with a band once a week or more. And because playing with others is way more fun, they’re going to get their friends into it too, learning new songs, buying new gear…. We really hope that retailers will see the JamHub as creating an opportunity to change music-making for the better.”
NAMM Booth 410
Toll-free (877) JAM-HUBS
info@JamHub.com
http://www.jamhub.com/
Get the complete article: order Music Trades Today |
