Roland JP-8

[-X-]

Personally, I am not much impressed by the JP8. I know, people will think that I do not know what I am talking about. However, I had a lot of synths in my studio and all had their goods and their bads. What I did not like with the JP8 was the modulation depth or better the lack of it.

I got the JP8 for a good deal and at that time I let go of my JP6 to finance part of the 8. The overall sound is beautiful. I especially like the PWM with the sinus LFO. The filters are great too. But there it stops. I did not like that the env amount of the filter cutoff is only covering 1/2 of the overall cutoff range, if at all. Forget about agressive brass!! I did not like how sync and cross modulation was implemented, e.g. when using both the pitch went to hell (even the virus does sync and crossmodulation from Osc1 to Osc2 for both). At the end, I did not like that everything out of this synth sounded nice, almost as I have a preset synth with some subtle changes.

Another thing is, that most of the time the JP8 was resting in the clothed due to failure. I fixed it all myself for pennies in parts, but it took time to trace down problems and so on. But I guess, that is part of having older gear (maybe it is the charme of having older gear). But since I am no Windows user, my stuff has to run and should not give me grief most of the time.

Needless to say, off it went and I bought the JP6 from my friend. Now, the JP6 is a much different beast. Thinner sounding for sure. But the modulation depth is incredible. The sync/xmod works perfectly to make these agressive kind of sounds. The multimode filter is a very nice addition too. At the end, I just got more out of the 6 than the 8. But that is just me, it doesn't mean anything.

Nowadays, I am much more into VA because you have much more control over the sound from your keyboard and controllers. The only analog that can match the control is the Xpander/Matrix-12.