SessionBand Jazz Lets You Create Arrangements With Jazz Session Musicians

SessionBand Jazz is a virtual musician app for the iPad designed to let you quickly create chord-based arrangements featuring live instruments.

The app lets you create chord progressions and then turn automatically turn them into loop-based performances. 

Features:

  • Over 16,000 individually recorded, chord-based jazz loops included
  • 15 of the most popular jazz styles and tempos e.g. Slow Swing (4 feel), Afro Jazz, Up Swing (2 feel)
  • From 60bpm through to 220bpm
  • Each of the 15 jazz styles includes 10 chord variations for every root note
  • Maj7(9), maj7(#11), 7(13), 7(b9), 7(#5,#9), 7sus(13), m7(9), m7(b5), m(maj7). dim

Features 4 top jazz artists:

  • Drums – Ralph Salmins (Wynton Marsalis, Burt Bacharach, Elton John, Madonna, Robbie Williams, Quincy Jones…)
  • Saxes, Flutes – Andy Panayi (Peter Erskine, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Paul McCartney…)
  • Bass – Geoff Gascoyne (Georgie Fame, Michel Legrand, Sting, Van Morrison, Benny Golson, Jamie Cullum…)
  • Piano – Tom Cawley (Jack DeJohnette, Charlie Watts, Jane Monheit, Stacey Kent, Yaron Herman, Guy Barker, Peter Gabriel…)
  • All loops recorded at the famous Bunker studios (UK)
  • All loops are copyright free and can be used freely in your own jazz compositions

Here’s an example of what you can do with SessionBand Jazz:

http://soundcloud.com/iclifdotme/in-a-good-way-clifs-way-at

While no replacement for a live band, it’s easy to see how this could be useful for both arranging and for sampling.

SessionBand Jazz is available for $3.99 in the App Store.

21 thoughts on “SessionBand Jazz Lets You Create Arrangements With Jazz Session Musicians”

  1. On one hand, this is the logical extension of the Garageband® paradigm. Break music up into toy blox and let the kidz play. If I’m understanding it correctly, one could use this to practice playing over jazz chord changes in a bunch of styles. In this regard, it will likely be much better than Band in a Box for this function. However, having the app “play improvised solos” seems a bit lackluster in this demo. Not that these aren’t monster players (though the electric piano solo in that demo track seemed a bit rough)- it’s more that this takes the soul of jazz (improvisation) and sets it aside.

    1. I am part of the team at SessionBand. Just wanted to point out that the audio demo posted here is a user-created demo and this guy has used SessionBand Jazz as a bed for his own electric piano improvisation. There are no electric piano loops in SessionBand Jazz. All the loops on SessionBand Jazz (over 16,000 of them) are all chord-based and were all individually recorded using ONLY real instruments eg. Yamaha grand piano, saxophones, flutes, double basses etc.
      Worth pointing out that the app is Audiobus compatible which makes it very easy to stream audio from the app into other apps like GarageBand so that users can go on to add more instruments etc… I am guessing this is what Clif has done here with his demo. Thanks Paul (SessionBand)

      1. You’re correct regarding my track. I put together the backing track with SessionBand for a challenge on iOSMusic.org. This was my own attempt to improvise over the changes using IK Multimedia’s iLectric Piano app. I’m not primarily a jazz musician OR a keyboard player, which is why the solo is a bit rough around the edges. But then, I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? 😉

      2. I bought the Piano app to try it out, and despite thinking it was a wonderful idea, it lost all ‘real’ potential for me when I realized that many of the sequences/chords caused audible clicks when placed in sequence, basically reducing the app to nothing but a rough sketchpad when it could have been so much more. ALL the loops need to be reassessed and re-engineered to make sure they DO NOT cause clicks when going from loop to loop, that’s just terrible. If you can work THAT out, I’m pretty sure I’d buy each and every one in the series. Otherwise, it’s just a tremendous loss of a great opportunity. Sorry 🙁

  2. As a “final song generator”, it’s questionable of course. But what a fantastic gizmo to practice with! Jamming along with this app and challenging yourself with some neat and tricky chord changes could really develop one’s skill.

  3. Thanks for the review. It’s a great app. For an instrumentalist wanting to improvise over sophisticated jazz chords and have them played literally by a real band ….nothing else like it.

  4. Very good app with loads of high quality loops……sax and flute solos are superb…..but main use for me will be having a great comping accompaniment which this apps seems to do v well….really well put together

  6. Thanks for chiming in, Paul, and for clarifying. It’s clear that many hours of careful work went into making this. And from what I’ve seen, this app seems to take up where Aebersold left off.

  7. Having bought all four of the SessionBand apps, I can say they’re pretty decent for guide ideas for tunes with a couple of caveats, which I’ve fixed in updates would make it pretty formidable…

    Issues with SessionBand:

    The original SessionBand cannot use Audiobus and also can’t play in the background.

    None of the instrument tracks can be interchanged .e.g. you have a great bass, piano, etc.. but would like to try it with another styles drums?

    SB files are isolated and cannot be exchanged between SessionBand apps

    What would be fantastic (though not essential) is:
    Preview song blocks by tap?
    Chord progression suggestions.
    Midi Chords export.

    Don’t get me wrong SessionBand is a cool idea, it just feels limited for no reason, as I feel the loops have no need to be lock to one style at a time.

    This limits experimentation, innovation and most of all originality.

    Plus, it’s a waste of all the styles in the original SessionBand .

  8. Paul, I noticed there were a few reviews reporting some stability problems. How active is the development team in keeping this software working? Will it be compatible with iPad2?

    1. Hi. Thanks for the comments. We are very committed to bug fixes (like every serious app developer) and there are a few that we have picked up in the latest SessionBand releases including a stability issue with Audiobus which was very deep rooted. We hope to have new versions in the next 2 weeks with various fixes in place.

      SessionBand is an intensive app and like quite a few new audio-based apps, it does push the processing power of the devices. It has been optimised for iPad2/iPhone 4S and newer and should work well on those devices. We do make it clear in app store copy (and will make it even clearer in v1) that older devices may struggle. Note, Apple’s compatibility list is beyond our control.

      Quite a few users have complained about the fact that we removed the real-time tempo shift control in the Piano and Acoustic versions. This was not an oversight – we honestly felt that with exposed solo piano and acoustic guitar, the 3rd party software we use to time stretch (which is considered to be the best available and used on a number of best selling audio apps) deteriorated the sound of these natural instruments too much. Of course, there are some great tempo-shifting programs which frankly work better but they involve rendering the audio and we felt that was not in the spirit of SessionBand. However, we are re-introducing the tempo shift on both of these apps at v1.1 because so many people say they want it. in the Jazz app – where we retained this function at v1.0 – it works quite well because the piano is typically sat back in the mix and seems relatively unaffected. On the electronic loop sets in the SessionBand Original app we think it works very well.
      Hope this is useful. Paul
      PS. Please do write to us with any issues: [email protected]

    1. Hi Clif

      We have a number of exciting plans for the SessionBand range and adding Audiobus compatibility to the SessionBand Original app is definitely up there. For anyone reading this who hasn’t got Audiobus yet – it really is a great way to link up audio-based apps. Paul

  10. Hi,

    Great app but when will the original SessionBand App be compatible with the Audiobus App?

    BTW, the wife is not happy with me spending more money:)

    Regards

    Hynesy

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