Without a doubt, BOSS’ wildly popular eBand products make music practice fun, productive, and downright addictive. The eBand concept—first introduced with the eBand JS-8 Audio Player with Guitar Effects and later included in the MICRO BR BR-80 pocket multitrack recorder—combines a digital music player, a BOSS processor with world-class amps and effects, and a ton of useful practice features all in one package. You simply plug in, dial up one of a huge range of studio-quality tones, and then jam along with backing tracks, rhythms, or your favorite songs. Convenient, satisfying, and fun—that’s what eBand is all about!

The latest eBand is the new JS-10 Audio Player with Guitar Effects. It brings many enhancements over the previous-generation JS-8, including an impressive 2.1 stereo speaker system with subwoofer, dual inputs that allow guitarists, bassists, and/or singers to play together, COSM amps and effects derived from the flagship GT-100, and lots more.

eBand is perfectly suited for lots of players, from bedroom jammers to teachers in lesson studios. Not surprisingly, it’s also become a favorite of many pro players to help them build and maintain their skills at home and on tour. Virtuoso shredder John Petrucci, guitarist for the legendary prog-metal band Dream Theater, has been an enthusiastic eBand user since the JS-8 first came out. Herman Li of DragonForce takes his eBand on the road, using it to warm-up before every show and practice while traveling between tour stops. And bassist Derrick Murdock, a member of the house band on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for many years, uses his recently acquired eBand to learn and work out the songs he has to play for his many different gigs.

Sweet Tones, Ready to Go

The new JS-10 has an updated effects engine outfitted with COSM amps and effects from the acclaimed GT-100, BOSS’ latest top-of-the-line multi-effects processor. On tap is a huge selection of ready-to-play guitar tones suited for a variety of styles, from sparkling clean to blues crunch to mega distortion. Many multi-effects patches designed for bass and vocals are included as well.

The Category feature makes it easy to find basic sounds, and you can customize them quickly with EZ EDIT, a simple and intuitive grid-style editor. A dedicated AMP button on the front panel takes you directly to the amp settings, so you can change up the amp type and adjust gain and tone on the fly. If you want to go deeper under the hood and do some hands-on tweaking of individual effects, there’s a full complement of detailed controls for serious tone editing, with 100 user patch locations to store your custom settings.

Dual Inputs and a Killer 2.1 Sound System

With the JS-10, eBand is no longer a solo experience. Dual inputs allow you to plug in two different guitars, basses, and/or mics simultaneously, so your band members and music friends can jam along, too. Each input has its own dedicated effects, letting both musicians enjoy studio-quality sound.

An integrated audio system includes stereo speakers and a down-firing subwoofer, providing rich, full, and loud sound that belies the JS-10’s small footprint. The extra low end from the sub delivers a satisfying experience for riffing with heavy guitar tones, plus plenty of punch and thump for bass playing and rhythm tracks.

Onboard Jam Tracks and Song Playback

The JS-10 comes with an SD card preloaded with over 350 audio loops for jamming along—including new “minus-one” audio for bass, two guitars, and guitar and bass—plus 50 new songs. The loops consist of high-quality, full-band audio tracks in a variety of styles, along with many drums-only rhythms.

You can play and jam with your own WAV or MP3 songs, loops, and backing tracks in eBand, too, either via an SD card, a USB flash drive, or by plugging an iPod or other music player into the convenient front-panel AUX input. The included eBand Song List Editor lets you communicate with the JS-10 from your computer over USB; with the editor, you can load WAV/MP3 tunes, rip songs from music CDs and load them into eBand, edit song titles, and more.

A very convenient feature in eBand is the ability to save effects patches with specific songs and loops stored on the SD card. Every time you call up a song or loop, your saved patch is called up, too, so you can start playing immediately!

Practice Made Perfect

The JS-10 is outfitted with an abundance of essential tools for music practice and learning licks and songs. There’s a built-in chromatic tuner, plus an AB REPEAT function that lets you play a section of a song over and over to really nail a part. And to check your progress as you practice, a super-simple recording function lets you instantly capture your jams along with the musical backing. You can also set the JS-10 to record only the input sound without the backing if desired. 

Perhaps the coolest and most useful practice feature is the ability to independently adjust the tempo and pitch of any song or loop. You can easily change the speed of a song without changing its pitch, which is really great for slowing down fast musical passages so you can nab licks and develop speed and accuracy. Alternately, you can change the pitch of a song without changing its tempo; this helps a guitarist or bassist master their fretboard skills in every musical key, and lets a singer quickly adjust a song’s key to suit their voice.

eBand’s Center Cancel function uses special processing to reduce the volume of center-located sounds in any stereo recording. This is particularly useful for singing practice, as it allows you to remove the lead vocal from popular songs for karaoke-style performances. Center Cancel removes instrumental solos, too, creating “minus one” tracks that are perfect for jamming your own solos.

The PC Connection

The JS-10 also functions as a USB audio interface, so you can use it as a high-quality I/O and audio playback system for computer-based recording. All of the JS-10’s COSM amps and effects can be used, giving you great tones and latency-free performance for recording guitar, bass, and vocals directly into the computer. And with the JS-10’s nice sounding 2.1 speakers, you have a compact, ready-to-go monitoring system to pair with a laptop DAW rig.

Jam, Learn, and Have Fun!

With its great sound system, awesome tones, jam-along music playback, and useful practice features, the eBand JS-10 is so fun that you’ll get carried away riffing for hours on end. And the more you play, the better you get! Join the eBand revolution today and build your skills just like the pros.

Be sure to visit the JS-10 Tone Room, where we have a free download of famous tones from 25 classic guitar songs that you can use in your eBand JS-10. While you’re there, you can also get info on purchasing full-band jam tracks for these songs at GuitarInstructor.com, complete with tab for learning the parts!