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There are many aspects to learning to play the guitar, with solitary practice being the one that is likely to take up the vast majority of your time. However, if the aim is to play in a band, you will really only progress by getting together with other musicians and learning the art of listening to and playing in time with a rhythm section.

Getting live sessions together can take considerable organisation, so ideally there should be something to fill the gulf between practising scales and learning riffs on your own, and the act of playing with other musicians.

That halfway house has to be playing along with backing tracks and Line 6 has just come up with something that easily facilitates that: the Spider Jam, a combo amp that comes loaded with quality backing tracks for you to play along with.

Now, this concept isn't exactly new: Fender launched its G-DEC over three years ago. However, Line 6 has developed the idea with an amp of sufficient size to be able to hold its own at gigs while it also features onboard backing tracks recorded by some of LA's finest sessioneers. On top of that there's an onboard looping recorder with plenty of memory for recording your own backing.

The amp

The Spider Jam is a compact 75-watt combo equipped with a 12-inch Celestion Custom speaker (plus a two-inch full range tweeter for the backing tracks). Like the rest of the Spider III family, this is a modelling amp and you get 12 amp models selected by a front panel rotary knob.

There are 'red' and 'green' versions of Clean, Twang, Blues, Crunch, Metal and Insane models all based on famous names. The front panel offers the usual array of amp controls and there are three knobs to add effects.

The first knob selects either chorus/flange, phaser or tremolo and also dials in the strength of the effect from subtle to extreme. The second knob does the same for delay, tape echo or sweep echo and is allied to a tap tempo button, while the third simply turns up the reverb.

If you don't fancy dialing in your own sounds from scratch there are also a bunch of onboard presets, over 200 of which are artist-created alongside over 150 that are song-based and 36 user-programmable patches.

Your own backing band

The backing track facility consists of a whole bunch of pure drum loops but also over a 100 jam tracks with full instrumentation, categorised by musical styles. The tempo of the drum loops can be altered to taste and the pitch of the jam tracks can be changed to accommodate alternative keys – the tempo automatically altering up or down dependent on the change in pitch. All backing tracks can be put on endless repeat for sustained practice.

For the jam tracks, Line 6 tells us that it compiled a roster of A-list session players and recorded them at quality studios including Steve Vai's studio and Sound Emporium's Studio B in Nashville.