Fiddly things, SD Cards. And when you have half a dozen of them, all the same type, they can be hard to identify. Why so many, you might ask – especially when one 2 Gig card can hold about 200 3-4 minute songs in WAV format? Well, it's simple. The less songs that there are on an SD card, the faster they are to find. With the tiny screen on a Spider Jam and the 8.3 filenames, songs can suffer from the 'needle in the haystack' problem.
I like to have one card purely to backup the contents of the internal memory, one with all the backing tracks I regularly use at home and another for new songs that we are doing in the band. I can take my Spider Jam along to rehearsals and play the tracks to the other guys to demonstrate how something goes. It is handy being able to change the key (pitch) if the vocalist can't manage the original key and slow a track down to nail an elusive riff or chord.
None of the SD cards I've seen ship with self-adhesive labels – not that they would be a lot of use being so small. I wanted something a bit bigger and bolder so I came up with the idea of tags.
My tags are laser printed on fluorescent paper. One continuous strip of 18mm (3/4") Scotch Magic tape wraps from the front of SD card, across the front and round the back of the tag, effectively laminating it, and then half the way along the back of the SD card. I keep the tape well clear of the contacts. This makes a very visible and easily handleable, SD card.
One of these cards that has dropped on the ground in a dimly lit gig environment is much easier to find and identify that a little black rectangle of plastic!
Here is a PDF file of tags that you can print for yourself.
Even thought there are some effects built into the Spider Jam, they are fairly basic and you might well want to hook up a favourite effects pedal. I just love my Roland RE-20 Space Echo and Ibanez Tube Screamer but I also have a POD XTlive and a Behringer Ultra Acoustic Modeler – which is great for adding acoustic tones to an electric guitar.
The question is, what is the best way to use all these pedals with a Spider Jam. Well, there are two principles going on here. Most pedals are intended to be plugged into the input of an electric guitar amplifier. So, all those stomp boxes just go into the normal guitar input of the Spider Jam and you dial in your favourite amplifier model as usual. All you have to do is make sure that any Spider Jam effects are turned off, you don't really want to double up. You might want to make a preset with everything in neutral.
When you have a POD, or some other unit that does amp and speaker modelling, it is better to use the Spider Jam as a mini PA system. A guitar amplifier is designed to favour certain frequencies and to distort in a predictable manner. A PA system, on the other hand, is just a heavy duty hi-fi setup. It should reproduce all frequencies fairly evenly without colouration or distortion.
So, if you have amp and speaker modelling switched on in the external unit, it should be going into the MIX or AUX (mixed with MIC) inputs of the Spider Jam. There is a bank of presets associated with the MIC channel but these are just a flat frequency response amplifier with different levels of EQ, reverb, echo and compression. Any of the presets can be overwritten with a dead flat setting, so, if you don't use keyboards, for instance, you can set Keyboards 1 to a neutral setting with no EQ, echo, reverb or compression and use that setting for your modelling pedal. These settings will persist even after switching the amp off and on again but they are not saved permanently. Changing to a different MIC/AUX preset will wipe your modified settings.
Alternatively, you may be able to switch off amp and speaker modelling in the pedal and go into the Spider Jam guitar input. You don't really want a double dose of modelling as it makes things difficult to tweak.