Roland Jupiter 8 (JP8)

[Erwin Vos]

The Jupiter 8 was Roland’s first truly professional analog synthesizer. The Jupiter 8 features 16 rich analog oscillators at 2 per voice, eight voice polyphony and easy programming! At eight voices you can get some pretty thick analog sounds. Easy and intuitive programming via front panel sliders, knobs and buttons for all your tweaking needs. The legacy of the Jupiter synthesizers is due to their unique voice architecture and design, creating sounds that were so unreal and amazing that they have to be heard! No other synths in the world can create analog sounds as cool and authentic as these.

The Jupiter 8 was the biggest and fattest of them all (Jupiters and Junos)! It was one of the first synths to allow its keyboard to be split and layered – it’s eight voices of trance heaven! Cross-mod, oscillator sync, a great LFO and a classic arpeggiator are also on-board. (The arpeggiator can be heard all over the Duran Duran classic, “Rio”.) There’s also two killer resonant analog 24dB/oct filters with 2-pole and 4-pole settings as well as low- and high-pass filtering methods. Unfortunately for the earlier models, tuning was very unstable but that seemed to be resolved in later models. Unlike its smaller counterpart, the Jupiter 6, the Jup 8 does not feature MIDI, only Roland’s DCB sync can be found on some models. However, MIDI retro-kit’s are available from various companies. Patch presets can store keyboard splits, arpeggiator settings, voice assign mode, hold, portamento and modulation settings.

Technical Info
Polyphony: 8 voices
Oscillators: 2 VCO’s per voice (16 oscillators’s!!!!) switchable between triangle, sawtooth, pulse, and square waves plus noise on OSC 2
LFO: 4-waveform (sine, tri, ramp, random) LFO
VCF: 24 dB/oct lowpass/high pass, 12 dB/oct bandpass, 6dB high pass with their own ADSR envelope. 2-pole and 4-pole settings
VCA: Standard ADSR and mixer to balance oscillator levels
Memory: 64 patches and 8 patch presets
Keyboard: 61 note keyboard
Contro: DCB Roland to Roland sync/interface on some models
Current$$: $500 – $1,500

source: https://www.vintagesynth.com

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