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.
I know because I still own the actual one bought from Ian Stanley (Their co-writer) and includes the operation manual with a couple of their songs mapped out
My main synths now are Kenton Pro 2000MKII x2, Roland Jupiter 4, System 100, TR909 - Korg MS20 x2, SQ10, VC10, WavestationA/D - Waldorf Blofeld and the great U-He Zebra2