anyone here who owns one or tried one? experience?

i just read about it that it can break easily and have very few patches

 

Yes i had one ,in 2000 ,i remember ,that i had a slight delay with midi,always a bit late in midi synchronization.I like the sound i used it mostly for his acid sound for trance,and also awesome leads.

 

have you tried the vengeance presets for jp? if yes, are they good?

 

Its a unique piece of hardware, it doesn't have many patches but you can create them or buy the ones you like, its close to a Nord Lead 3 like sound, I loved it very much ...sold my own years ago and I regret it

 

i regret selling my novation ultranova! the reason i sold it is because i really had some weird thoughts about it. i regret too.. i think that even if i dont use my old akai lpk midi it was my first one. its a memory, a piece of that time back then

 

Yes they are really good, especially for 00s style trance/hard trance

As for breaking easily, not so sure about that. had mine recapped and still sounds as good as ever. only issue I have is with the transformer humming. It's noticeable but doesn't affect the output sound in anyway. Other issues is down to software if you're using the arua plugin it can lag a bit. If you just trigger it through your daw with midi and record automations by hand its fine.

 

I had both the JP8000 and the 8080 rack. I used to play synths (and some guitar) in a semi-successful, kinda sophisticated sounding, pop/rock band. I did about 35-40 gigs with them in 2001-2002. They sound very good and can be very fat for digital synths, actually so fat that i had my engineer constantly cutting lows and low mids in the soundchecks because rock band, you know? hehe... In two years i never had either of them break. But i kept them both in custom made flight cases constantly when traveling and never abused them physically while being stoned or drunk or both lol.
Their main attraction is their Super Saw capability, reminiscent of the -much sought after even back then- Roland MKS80 (a.k.a. SuperJupiter) and probably the reason they became an instant hit and best seller for 2-3 years. Everybody in trance and prog house had at least one of these. It can produce lots of good to great leads and basses but to me its real strength is layered pads, preferably string pads using Super Saw. You can always arpeggiate/gate Super Saw sounds, it's what the trance dudes did all the time and how these synths became a signature sound for the late 90s/early 2Ks. Plus the Roland Delay on many of the sounds can be fabulous.
Indeed there are not many patches in these, but most of them are great if you know your left from right in sound design/patch tweaking. Let your fingers and imagination do the shit, yeah baby. And as mentioned there are some great 3rd party sounds for it as well. But hey let's just listen to the JP8000 (sometimes the guy in the video does whatever he's not supposed to do but it's ok i guess)

Cheers

 

Last edited: Sep 14, 2024

Owned a JP8080 for several years, straight forward to program, sounded great in a mix. I felt the build quality was a little meh, the faders and knobs were a bit wobbly but overall it was a nice synth. Lot of VAs to choose from back in the 2ks, so I parted ways with it and traded up to a Nord Lead 2 and 3.

I keep hoping that Roland will release a boutique version, apart from the JD-08 it's the only other boutique synth that would interest if it ever gets released.

If you decide to pick one up on the used market, I can recommend the Manuel Schleiss Xplorations and SOR Revolutions soundsets from way back. Both are really nice collections of incredibly well thought out presets and used them consistently throughout the time I had my JP.

 

Excellent thread starter.

 

Which would you recommend to a son, daughter, niece, nephew, and why? Thanks.

 

sounds exactly what it supposed to sound like. amazing.. i think it has its own characteristic sound

 

what about jp6k plugin does it sound as good or worse?

 

Realistically should be the JP8080 rack. As a synth, it is the bigger brother to the keyboard since it has a 10 voice polyphony vs the Jp8000's 8 voice. So yeah even fatter Super Saws and it can also do Unison mode for crazy fat leads and basses which the keyboard can't. If you come up with some cool great synth hook then Unison will make it a killer fat beast to stand out in any mix whatsoever.
The 8080 has an audio input and does really good vocoder which i loved, as it partially emulates the classic Roland VP330. If you like Daft Punk-like vocoder lines you 'll be in for a treat. It has more patches too and more effects. The only downside and this stands for the keyboard too, is it has a slightly bad midi config. It's sort of all over the place and this was a surprise to me back then as i was used to great midi from Roland always since they pioneered the thing anyway with (Tom) Oberheim and Dave Smith's Sequential Circuits (Yamaha stepped in a bit later if i recall correctly). I was using a very complex SysEX controlled rig of many synths (the others were Matrix1000, JD800 & 990, Korg MS2000, Emulator IV) and i had to leave these two out of my live midi equation because sometimes they would just fuck up and do something entirely different than the midi command implied or nothing at all, and all these on a Roland midi patchbay as well. And it was very weird since my Oberheim Matrix1000 from the 80s would behave normally and the JPs were haywire. But for simple midi triggering sounds in the studio it is just ok.
Cheers

 

Last edited: Sep 14, 2024

The downside to any rack synths is they lack immediacy. Look on here even, just for the number of users who ask questions about CC automation. They have no data entry method to your DAW/sequencer. You still need to power up your DAW, or at minimum another controller to play it. A rack version can also add the complexity of hardware midi to something you could just as easily use a "very close" emulation plugin to.

Rack units make a lot of sense for lots of users. Space, they are always less expensive, way more difficult to damage, etc. But menu diving/possibly an editor program, lack of direct parameter controls, future resale, can be a hinderance to more people than you might guess. They almost always will end up being used less. For a novice user, or if you want tactile control, a keyboard version is frequently the better option.

 

I had the keyboard first and then the rack. I didn't like how the top panel on the keyboard version would bend slightly when pressing buttons etc. The rack did have better build quality. In the end, like clone said above, I moved on from the rack due to the lack of keyboard.

Great sounds from either though, really top notch for what it is. I say that bc obviously it's not going to do ultra lifelike sounds or any other thing it's not intended for. I miss them sometimes. They have a sound that I associate with Roland, in a good way. They were really easy on the ears, easy to program (including automating CC's), and fun to play.

The Ultranova was also a cool keyboard. That first patch on there was like smoking cybernetic DMT lol. It had a weird gain structure though, that always seemed to clip in the most annoying ways, which is why I sold it. Cool keyboard though, the mod matrix was badass

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2024

acording to my beliefs i can buy 1 or 2 synth a year with my job. that means around 1000 euro can be spent.. sometimes i wish i could buy anything i want, even a car.. but that is IMPOSSIBLE LOL

 

Spend your royal money baby

 

I know i answered already but i had my mind on which one of the two JPs is better rather than more fun. I need to backtrack on my initial answer, because old man here you see haha...
So even if the rack is a better synth it is more geared towards pros or semi-pro keyboardists/producers etc. For my daughter nephew and the likes i would recommend the keyboard as it is much more fun and all in all an interactive experience even if they don't know what a synth is.
Cheers

 

No no please any legit thoughts are coveted.

To me it seems what DIDN'T happen that NEEDS to happen is someone make a metal JP8000 in the style of Waldorf XTk. Go with the metal, transform the 8080 to keyboard. Add more height and then add CS-80 ribbon.



(not intended to seem definitive)

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2024

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