Yeah that's certainly another major factor in reproduction. The difference in tone that any particular recording chain makes is huge.

Wanna get an authentic late 90s vibe? Plug your JP into a Mackie 1604, add a splash of Quadraverb and record via a Soundblaster into Cubase VST 3.5 on Win 98 (be sure to cross your fingers for the Audio/MIDI to stay in sync whilst recording).

 

Yes, a break-out cable from the Sound Blaster DA-15 joystick port to one pair of MIDI i/o. I used to use a Waldorf Q, Nord 1, MS2000R, K2000 VXS and some other outboard synths into a Audiomedia III and later an ECHO GINA. Those were great times.

 

Last edited: Apr 28, 2025

Inspired by this thread I did something extra silly and built a supersaw-esque synth in Reaktor one sleepless night.



I read the papers a bit and guesstimated things and built two oscillators based on the 7 saws principle, other using a similar spread as described in the Alex Shore's paper. And the other creating a randomly modulated detunes. Both are stereo so there's 4x 7-saw oscillators in play. Then there's a stereo hard sync that can be spread up to +1/-1 oct for left and right. PWM sub osc and a stereo noise source.

Filter has keytracking of course and can be tuned to played notes as usual, but there's an octave setting on top of the base note to quickly create some overtones. Stereo LFO modulation for bonus swirl.

Oh, and for those Junoish moments threre's the all important hiss before chorus.

Does it sound like the real thing? Fuck. No. Just go all out and make it sound like a nest of hornets!

Ahh... insomnia and, uh, heavy medication is fun, isn't it?

 

I cannot speak from experience on a comparison between the two, timbrewise. Though, my only gripe with it so far is the absence of the "vintage" factory presets. On a broader subject, it really sucks you can't even find a proper ROM dump of the internal preset banks, only custom made sysex files.

Roland really needs to stepup their game in either making a proper model expansion for Zenology, or a faithful, standalone emulation of the JP-8000. Then again, some of the Roland Cloud plugins are notorious for going apes#£& with the CPU usage.