The Lowdown
It’s attractive, well made, and fills a niche in the market for a bag to carry oversized kit. If that’s what you’re looking for, the Namba JuJu has got you—and your gear—covered.
First Impressions / Setting up
The bag is boxy, looking like a cross between a fabric suitcase and an oversized backpack. It is attractive (the review sample was grey and bright red), and the internal padding is substantial. There’s a large pocket on the front with a smaller zip pocket across the front of that. There’s also another zip pocket across the back, which would be a good place to store straps that you didn’t want to use.
Straps? Yup, it comes with a good choice of those. Apart from a handle (in the same place you’d expect to see a handle if it were a suitcase), there are two backpack style carrying straps, and also a shoulder strap, all of which are adjustable.
On the “bottoms” (the parts that would touch the ground were you to put it down vertically – backpack style – or horizontally – suitcase style) are large sewn-on knobbly rubber-style pads to keep the fabric off wet pavements and the like.
Inside the bright red interior there’s one well-padded single compartment, with a thin net across half of the underside of the lid, and a pair of nylon straps similar to those you’d find in a suitcase, the latter being designed to keep the contents securely in place.
The bag comes with three padded rectangular cube-like attachments with velcro on two sides of them. These can be attached in one of two ways (width ways or lengthways) to velcro on the walls of the main compartment, effectively altering the size of the internal space quite substantially.
In Use
The blocks are the real genius of this design. With them, you can carefully pack your controller in the safest position, no matter its exact size. I tried the bag with the Traktor Kontrol S4, the Vestax VCI-400 and the Numark NS6, and could get them all to fit snugly (see photos).
What’s more, even with controllers where you don’t need all the blocks (like the Numark NS6, which is very wide), the “extra” blocks are great to use for packaging to help ensure a snug fit. Using them, you could create “protected” internal space for headphones, cables etc, knowing that the chances of everything in there getting squashed are slim.
The front compartment is the perfect size for a 15″ or 17″ laptop, although my smaller laptop rattled around in there.
One thing that could be improved are the velcro straps internally. They are intended to run across the bag, but the way they are adjustable means you can’t get them tight enough on your gear. It wouldn’t matter with really large gear that filled the bag to its limits, but anything less than that in size and they are ineffective unless you attach them diagonally, which is what I did.
The nylon carry hand has vinyl-coated padding on it for comfort, which while not the most luxurious in the world does the job. The padded backpack straps are surprisingly comfortable, as is the shoulder strap. They’d be no issues carrying reasonably heavy gear a distance with this on your back.
Conclusion
This bag was plainly designed to do a job. There is a shortage of good bags for carrying oversized gear, and the issue with such bags is that if you don’t have one that fits your particular combination of gear perfectly, your gear is going to rattle around inside there, not getting the protection it needs.
As you can see from the pictures, I managed to get a good fit for the controllers I mentioned in the intro, although I think it’s best suited to something like the NS6. Some of the other controllers, while they fit fine, would also fit in smaller bags and thus be easier to transport.
Of course, the best bag for any piece of gear is going to be one that fits it perfectly, but saving that, something like this is an excellent all-rounder. What’s more, with a bit of ingenuity it could serve you just as well as your DJ set-up changes over the years, plus if you have an extra piece of gear (audio interface, sampler etc) to fit in as well as your controller, it’d be more possible to do so in here than in a custom bag.
So it’s attractive, well made, and fills a niche in the market for a bag to carry oversized kit. If that’s what you’re looking for, the Namba JuJu has got you – and your gear – covered.
