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 pitch wheel that could be assigned to the VCA, VCF, VCO or all together, there are 8 memory locations and a cool arpeggiator - the arpeggiator can be heard in the Duran Duran classic, "Rio". 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.

Marshall Penn

January 19, 2012 @ 5:52 am

I had one of these in the late nineties. It cost £1100 or so. God i wish i still had it, i just dialed in a sound and went. It was so simple it never let the music get in the way!

gabriel

January 14, 2012 @ 8:50 pm

@stuart: i don't own a jup4 on my own but a promars which is very similiar. perhaps this is the solution for your problem: on the promars you can't edit the presets and the sounds that have been stored. editing is just possible in manual mode (do you have a button called like this on your jup4?) ... so you can't modify a stored patch what makes patch-storing having less or no sense ....

Thomas Faurby

January 8, 2012 @ 10:04 am

A demo of this great synth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6PQucVg7k

line of control

January 4, 2012 @ 9:17 pm

Don't these usually sell for 2-3 thousand USD these days? VSE really needs to update its prices and values...

Stuart

January 4, 2012 @ 8:50 am

I just recently got my JP4 up here to NYC from NC...it hadn't been played in over a year. It powers up, the sounds are still stored to my knowledge, but none of the sliders or knobs really do anything. Any advice on restoring her to "like new?" I'd open her up and try to clean the insides, but I'm a tad hesitant....please help!!

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