Walter Ego wrote:madtheory wrote:
knolan wrote:
I think Walter Ego's appraisal of it's sound is wide off the mark. It's hugely respected, constitutes THE classic Roland sound of the 80's, has about as much character as the best of them, and is loved and sought after the world over.
Except that, unless PWM is required (because some of them don't have that as I said earlier), all the other Roland polys can do exactly the same sounds, plus a whole lot more, for less money.
Hm. I was really just saying that compared to, say, the Jupiter line, the Juno 60 sounds quite digital to my ears--namely it has those noisy hollow digital artifacts that detract from the sound. They can be minimized, but they're still present, just like on a lowly Poly-800.
But as far as the tone goes, I agree completely that it's a classic. It's a powerful and simple workhorse of a synth and it's almost impossible to make it sound bad--very good tuning of filter and parameters to make it one big sweet spot. I agree with all that, and the only way I would sell mine would be if I came back into a Jupiter 6 or something comparable.
I was also saying I'm not interested in a 106; full automation would be nice, I suppose, but I like playing the 60, and I stand by my claim that it's better made, and I do think worth more than a 106. I wouldn't pay what I paid for the 60 for the 106, anyway.
Not sure what those artifacts are? I've owned my J106 since it was new in the mid 80's and never noticed artifacts - not saying they're not there - just never noticed them.
Overall, speaking on the J106 alone as that's what I know well; what makes the J106 special is the DCO-VCF combination - it can give the Juno an almost "PPG" sound - and - when the VCF is set to self-oscillation and shaped with envelope amount (positive or negative) coupled to suboscillator and noise in managed amounts, offers a very uniques set of rich, evolving pad sounds that can't (in my experience) be created on a pure analogue synth (or indeed a purely digital one).
When coupled to filter self-resonance (or indeed near self-resonance but not 'quite' there) - and both set ti different pitches, and then use nuanced amounts of suboscillator, noise, gentle envelope shaping, keyboard tracking and chorus - you can achieve almost "Tomita" level choral type sounds, and gluttery fender rhodes type sounds (admittedly only over a few octaves at a time). In such 'nuanced' sound design territory (for want of a better term) stepping through different PW values almost feels like you're stepping through wavetables, so different can the character of the sound be for each percentage duty cycle.
But then using the J106 saw-tooth with a brassy envelope through Chorus I and into a descent DDL and / or Reverb and its huge - I have peices I did in the '80s and 90's on it that are big - really big, thick and brassy - Oberheim in character - I mean - I'm really impressed (I didn't know any better at the time because I just owned a Casio1000P, a MonoPoly and a Juno 106 and that was it) - so I can tell you from younger innocent attempts that the range of sounds I achieved on the Juno 106 was genuinely broad, deep and varied. I have to say - I absolutely adore the sound of the Juno 106 - I think it has a very unique character of being both a big thick analog polysynth (when coaxed with its Chrous 1 (Chorus 2 can be a little too much 'chorus') plus DDL / Reverb - and then as said - and as hinted at by madtheory - a quite digital synth - but - for me in ways you want - in the best tradition of the PPG 2.3 being a digital oscillator synth passed into a VCF, or the Emulator two passing samples into an analogue VCF - so the J106 is in that company, in my opinion.
I'm actually not clear if the Juno 106 and the Juno60 sound the same. I don't track these synths on a 'chip' level - so perhaps you can argue they are virtually identical in make up - but what I do know is that a good friend of mine here in Dublin by the name of Owen Drumm (a genius who was servicing Windmill Lane's Fairlight CMI by the age of 15, and who shortly there after was called in by an engineering team in the UK to help solve problem with the Eurofighter Guidance Algorithm, and shortly there after designed his own 64-bit processor which ended up inside every Calrec mixing console for a decade - for starters - while also supporting all the engineering requirements of Def Leaoprd, designing the electronics behind U@'s Zooropa concerts and designing (in the 90's) a 72 channel digital mixer for Enya that had, as a library, reverse-engineered characteristics for ever famous analogue and analogue /digital hybrid such as SSL / Neve that Enya could call up at a whim) - and Owen also supported all of Enya and Nicky Ryan's studio equipment - and he used to wax lyrical to me about that the Juno60 sounded very different to the Juno 106 - indeed ALL arpeggiations on ALL Enya albums are only Juno60 - and nothing else would suffice - so given Owen's extraordinary pedigree and world-renowned reputation, I've always assumed the Juno60 was _very_ different to the Juno 106.
( For many years I was lucky enough for Owen to look after some of my instruments too
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