Tony Blews

I’ve always wanted a “Flying V” guitar, so when Postman Pat called today I was overjoyed. For about 10 minutes. What he brought was this: a WowWee PaperJamz Guitar, bought from Amazon for £25.99.

The PaperJamz Guitar is essentially a paper thin toy guitar, or at least thats what the marketing bumph says. In reality it is only paper thin if the paper in question is The Mail On Sunday (including all supplements).

The reason for this is simple. Whilst the actual capacitive sensors and sound transducer are paper thin, batteries are not. Plus, it it were paper this, it would flop about like a rabbit’s ears. So its actually about an inch thick at its fattest point.

This particular “guitar” is number 4 in a series of 6. Each one has a different look and is programmed with three songs to strum along to. On this model they are:

1. You Really Got Me (The Kinks)
2. Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones)
3. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult) – I had never heard of this one!

For each song, you can either play in “Perfect Play Mode”, where you just bash away at the strumming area to hear the song play, and “Rhythm Mode”, where you have to get the strumming at least vaguely correct. Neither of these are really that interesting.

What is interesting about the thing is the “Freestyle Mode”, which allows you to play your own songs by using the fretboard as a, well, fretboard. While you can’t actually make real chords on it, you can play pre-recorded chord samples by touching parts of the fretboard to select the base chord and modifiers, and strumming the strum area. They even include a handy chord chart to help you:

To sum this up briefly, to get the major chord, starting at E (don’t touch the fretboard), the frets count up FGABCDEFGA. To get a sharpened major, select the appropriate chord and also touch the next fret towards the body of the guitar. To get minor chords, select the base chord and also the fret two places towards the body. Sort of. Note that the frets don’t count up in the usual F F# G G# A etc. manner, and that they are all the same distance apart (a minor niggle – and a pisspoor joke on my part there, if you spotted it).

But, can you actually use this thing to bash out a real tune? Well lets have a look (and play Name That Tune at the same time)…

So there you have it. Its a sort of guitar, but not a really good one. If your could form real chords on it, then it would be a winner. Currently its just an amusing toy. I’m sure a future version will allow proper playing, and when it does I’ll buy one. Cos i’m sad like that.