10 August 2011

Testing the Roland Jupiter-80

At the moment I'm testing the new Roland Jupiter 80. Thanks to Live Music in Arnhem (NL) and Roland. I heard it briefly at the Musik Messe in Frankfurt and I was already pleasantly surprised then, but now that I'm able to play with it myself I'm totally convinced that it is a synth for me. Like I said before I'm not very into the acoustic sounds, however I did enjoy playing with some of those sounds a lot. Like the piano and violin sounds. But my main interest is the VA engine and now I'm sure it sounds like the GAIA engine (which I personally like a lot), but not 9 of them like I wrote before, but 10 actually :) You can even load a synth engine on the percussion part. So that gives a total of 30 1 oscillator synthesizers stacked all together. It is amazing what kind of power and movement you can get into your sounds. Each 1 oscillator synth has its own filter, VCA, LFO, envelopes etc. So imagine stacking that on top of each other 10 times in a single preset :) Bass sounds can have a lot of punch and low end, but you can also get screaming leads from it. But I think it excels really at string and pad sounds. From soft and mellow to grand and wide. That is what I'll be using it for most of the time I guess. Further more the build quality is excellent, the whole thing feels very solid and the keyboard and touch screen are excellent. I like the playing feel of the keys a lot. My kind of thing :) So I would say try it out! Stop whining that it is called Jupiter and that it is not analog, and don't judge it on the acoustic preset demos on YouTube demos with crappy audio, but find a real one and make some sounds yourself instead before you judge it! I'm happy and sad now actually. Happy that I could try it out a bit longer than in Frankfurt but sad that I'll have to return it in a couple of days. Mine is already ordered now and I'll wait impatiently until it is here :)

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