Apple Valley music teacher Troy Strand is rocking his students’ worlds.
The instructor had planned to give his eighth-graders fairly standard audio-production training on classroom iPads this year. Then Strand stumbled on an exotic alternative: a kind of mini electronic guitar that connects to the tablets, yet plays like a real guitar because it has real strings and frets.
This is not “Guitar Hero.”
The gadget, called the JamStik, dispenses with a regular guitar’s acoustical chamber but keeps a fingerboard. The gadget is intended as a guitar for the backpack-and-iPhone set.
The JamStik, developed by Minneapolis-based startup Zivix, has recently been on a tear.
Last year, not long after its release, the instrument scored coveted shelf space in some of Apple’s popular brick-and-mortar stores. This was after Apple had a bit of a hand in the JamStik’s development.
This month, an in-development JamStik successor, the JamStik+, has been a hit on Kickstarter with more than $600,000 in pledges. The campaign met its $50,000 goal in just four hours and was recently named a KickStarter staff pick.
As part of its Kickstarter campaign, Zivix had pledged to donate hundreds of JamStiks to schools. That is how Strand, who works at Apple Valley’s Paideia Academy charter school on behalf of the McPhail Center for Music, ended up with nearly two dozen of the devices.
Strand’s students now work with headphones donned, their JamStiks deployed, and their eyes glued on a projector screen displaying the instructor’s own iPad interface as he leads them along. The JamStik has sensors that detect finger positioning, and show them on the iPad screen.
“They can see where my fingers are going, and follow along,” said Strand. “It’s nice they have something small that fits on their laps and lets them really practice.”
“My students are thrilled,” said the instructor, who lives in St. Paul’s Dayton’s Bluff area.
MORE LIKE A REAL GUITAR
Dan Sullivan, the JamStik inventor who is now Zivix chief technology officer, can relate.
Sullivan is an electrical engineer with a lifelong passion for music.
As an exchange student in London decades ago, he took time off from his academics to play banjo as a street and cafe musician. Moving through Austria, France and Italy he and a guitar-playing pal “slept on the beach and played for our train tickets,” he recalled.
But his later attempts to combine his engineering and music into a career were a bust. A consumer synthesizer he invented never got to market. Neither did a kind of toy musical instrument that is a distant precursor to the JamStik.
Sullivan now appears to have the music-technology consumer hit he had sought.
He said he developed the technology in the JamStik by holing up for a couple of years in his furnace room to tinker with optical sensors of the kind that are now the gadget’s key (and patented) feature.
“Before you even pluck a string, the JamStik knows where your fingertips are placed,” he said.
Sullivan and his Zivix partners developed an early flavor of the JamStik, then called the “Hero Maker” in an attempt to tap a short-lived “Guitar Hero” video-game craze. When that market tanked, Zivix pivoted to a mobile-gadget strategy that is focused on Apple’s tablets and smartphones.
They demonstrated their technology at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., where they were initially met with skepticism. Apple suggested making the product less like a game device and more like a real guitar.
“We had (an automated) jam-mix feature for beginners,” Sullivan said, “But Apple said, ‘Why on Earth would anyone want that?’ They wanted to see some playability, and they nudged us along to get us more polished.”
Like the upcoming JamStik+, the original JamStik launched partly as a result of crowdfunding. The product raised more than $178,000 on Indiegogo,
with a campaign goal of $100,000, in July 2013.
Sullivan is no business genius and it is possible — even likely — that the JamStik would be another of his failed ventures without help from his business associates, Chad Koehler and Ed Cannon. They are Zivix’s vice-president of development and CEO, respectively.
Koehler has a video-gaming background that includes developing a popular gaming line called “Cabela’s Big Game Hunter.” Activision bought the brand in 1998. Koehler was at Activision during its “Guitar Hero” period and left the company in 2005.
Cannon, 63, who has been operating or investing in companies for years, was a Zivix investor and board member when he was nudged into a lead role. He does this for free, arguing that his current position is much more fun than retirement.
Zivix logs about 35 percent of its JamStik sales on its own site, Cannon said. Most of the rest comes from Amazon.com and Apple, which also offers the JamStik on its online store. The JamStik typically retails for about $250.
“We are exploring a number of different channels going forward,” Cannon said.
‘PATIENT INVESTORS’
Kickstarter is a crucial market for Zivix, as it is for other tech companies, even though it might account for a small percentage of overall sales. Those who become Kickstarter backers of tech products typically get discounted samples if the campaigns succeed — essentially making them customers.
Kickstarter backers “are a unique group of early adopters who are really creative,” which is what Zivix is all about, Cannon said.
Zivix is not yet profitable, he said, but “we have patient investors.” The company has not pursued venture capital, and instead relies on angel investors who don’t demand instant results.
Cannon said his strategy with the JamStik boils down to a simple goal: “Let’s ship out a few of of them, and find out what we did wrong, and what we did right, and let’s make a really reliable product,” however long that takes.
The upgraded JamStik+ also jacks into iOS gadgets, pumps out its audio via speakers or headphones, and emulates a variety of stringed instruments such as the banjo, harp and sitar.
The JamStik+ also has improved wireless-connectivity features, among other enhancements. It will retail for about $300 and, according to Zivix, also will be available in some Apple stores. The device is in the last stages of manufacturing and is due to ship in early June, Koehler said.
The education market figures prominently in Zivix’s future, Koehler noted, because the JamStik has turned out to be as much a classroom instruction tool as a home-consumer plaything.
The JamStik will not fully replace the electric guitar for professional musicians; it has only a fraction of the frets found on a traditional instrument, and those using the electronic device in school will typically start on another instrument eventually.
But, “It’s great for students grades 5 and 6 who might struggle to learn on a full-size guitar,” said Strand, the McPhail instructor.
It’s also good for older students, such as the eighth graders currently wielding JamStiks in his Paideia class, he added.
But, as an ultraportable device that can be tucked in a backpack and used anywhere, the JamStik will often stick around as “a learning tool and an exploration tool,” Strand said. “It is going to stay in their repertoire for quite a long time.”
Lynn Basinger, a music teacher at Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District in Baytown, Texas, has outfitted grade-school students with JamStiks to complement her ukelele and guitar instruction.
“It is an awesome teaching tool,” she said. “With the sensors in there, the screen lights up where your fingers are and tells you the right places to put them. Kids can build skills in a fun way, which is crucial for keeping them interested.”
What’s more, “they get that muscle memory that transfers to a guitar,” she added. “With real frets on the JamStik, the basic mechanics are all the same.”
But “they can practice anywhere, on a road trip with their family, because the JamStik does not make noise and does not disturb anyone in the car,” she said. “And yet they’re composing and creating their own music. They only need their headphones, and their iPhone or iPad.”
Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes about technology. Find him at ojezap.com.
