What is Jam Session?

Brøderbund's Jam Session is a blast, whether you’re tone deaf or an accomplished musician. A backup band plays a prerecorded accompaniment, and you play a solo by pressing keys on the Mac keyboard. The 19 songs supplied with the program cover jazz, classical, rock, country, Latin, reggae, rap, and more. And these aren’t just repeating patterns, they’re fully realized compositions with reasonably interesting chord changes and arrangements. As the music plays, animated musicians perform on screen in an appropriate environment.

The screens are cute, but more important, Jam Session sounds good. All the sounds are digital samples recorded from actual instruments, and even the piano and the heavy-metal power chords sound a lot like the real thing. Of course, the Mac isn’t renowned for high-quality audio — while a stereo hookup does wonders for the sound, you still hear a lot of digital noise and distortion (Jam Session does not support MIDI).

Cummings, Steve. (May 1988). Musical Musings. Macworld. (pg. 182).

See also: Apple II version

Download Jam Session for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 1.0 up to Mac OS 7.6

Compatibility notes

• 512 KB RAM
• 800 KB floppy disk drive
• Two 800 KB floppy disk drives or hard disk drive recommended
• External speakers or headphones recommended

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac