Roland • JUPITER 4
(click to enlarge)
The first Jupiter synth. It was among one of the first poly synthesizers (4 individual voices which could be synced together for one fat monophonic lead), it had a cool arpeggiator and a pitch wheel that could be assigned to the VCA, VCF, VCO or all together and there are 8 memory locations! It also has a very slow LFO for those ever-so-long filter sweeps. Pretty good for 1978!
Not so cool however, are the 10 preset sounds which sound nothing like the piano, brass or strings they claim to be. The placement of all the preset buttons below the keyboard can be inconvenient, especially while playing it. And as with most old analog synths, the Jupiter 4's tuning can go out often. Still it is a nice analog synth for creating weird trippy analog sounds. It's used by >Meat Beat Manifesto, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, Saint Etienne, the Cars, BT, Simple Minds, Moog Cookbook, Vangelis, The Human League, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Heaven 17, and film-maker Satyajit Ray.
Compared to other analogue polysynths I've owned or had extended access to, the Jupiter 4 is particularly thick sounding even in poly mode, which comes as a bit of a surprise seeing as it only has one oscillator per voice. The high pass filter is nice for thinning out pad sounds, while the LFO is very fast. not having used a synth with such a fast LFO before I hadn't realised how useful it is!
Overall, the Jupiter 4 is my favourite analogue synth, far better than the JX and Juno's that I've used before. It even puts my Korg Mono/Poly into second place, which is something I never thought I'd say.
As for the look - it's cool in an retro, 1970s way.
The sound is different to all other analog synths. Very dirty, very dark and really great. A beautiful synth and of my fav synths ever!