Q: How Does Bob Marley like his donuts?
A: Wi’ Jam in [1].
And Jamn is also the name of this little pocket software toolkit for musicians. It’s an iPhone app which shows you the notes in a any scale in any key, but it has a rather clever gimmick that makes it a lot easier to read: the notes are on a wheel.
My musical theory is limited to… Who am I kidding? I know nothing. I can read guitar tab (slowly) and I can play a few blues scales, and that’s about it. So I shall defer to the boffins who put Jamn together to tell you why it’s good:
The unique, patented Jamn Wheel lays out music in a circle instead of a line. All popular music is circular, with a song typically moving from harmony to conflict to climax, resolution then back to harmony again.
When seen as a wheel, the harmony and dissonance in scales and chords can be easily visualized. The Jamn Wheel also shows the tonic, major scale, relative minor scale and major, minor and diminished triads in an intuitive and logical way. Understanding these relationships is the basis of musical theory.
Zzzzz… Uh? Oh, hey! You’re back! As I was saying: Tonics, Triads and Climax. Sound like a hell of a Chinese gangland party. I’m actually thinking of grabbing this $2 app just to play around with. If I can find my guitar that is: it’s either the thing that’s holding up the pile of dust in the corner of my bedroom, or I lent it to a hippie friend of mine, in which case it’s probably covered in patchouli oil and beard hairs. Ugh.
Source: Jamn
Via: Beautiful Pixels
- Jam is what us Englanders call “jelly.” And Jelly is what we call Jell-O. Got it? Now, about those chips… ↩
