The Jupiter-8 was Roland's first truly professional analog synthesizer. The Jupiter-8 features 16 rich analog oscillators at 2 per voice, eight voice polyphony and easy programming! At eight voices you can get some pretty thick analog sounds. Easy and intuitive programming via front panel sliders, knobs and buttons for all your tweaking needs. The legacy of the Jupiter synthesizers is due to their unique voice architecture and design, creating sounds that were so unreal and amazing that they have to be heard! No other synths in the world can create analog sounds as cool and authentic as these.

The Jupiter-8 was the biggest and fattest of them all (Jupiters and Junos)! It was one of the first synths to allow its keyboard to be split and layered - it's eight voices of trance heaven! Cross-mod, oscillator sync, a great LFO and a classic arpeggiator are also on-board. There's also a killer resonant analog low pass filter, same as the Juno-6 / 60, with the added option of choosing 2-pole (12 dB/oct) or 4-pole (24 dB/oct) modes as well as a separate high-pass filter. Unfortunately for the earlier models, tuning was very unstable but that seemed to be resolved in later models. Unlike its smaller counterpart, the Jupiter-6, the Jup 8 does not feature MIDI, only Roland's DCB sync can be found on some models. However, MIDI retro-kit's are available from various companies. Patch presets can store keyboard splits, arpeggiator settings, voice assign mode, hold, portamento and modulation settings.

The Jupiter-8 has been used by Tangerine Dream, Orbital, Future Sound of London, Moby, Duran Duran, Underworld, Vince Clarke, Überzone, Jean Michel Jarre, Roxy Music, OMD, A Flock Of Seagulls, Depeche Mode, Rush, Meat Beat Manifesto, Banco De Gaia, Josh Wink, Thomas Dolby, Howard Jones, The Cars, Prince, Gary Wright, Jan Hammer, BT, Adrian Lee, Heaven 17, Kitaro, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Journey, Moog Cookbook, Toto, Yes, Devo, Freddy Fresh, George Duke, Greg Phillanganes, Jonathan Cain of Journey, Greg Johnson & Kevin Kendrick of Cameo, Stevie Wonder and Simple Minds.

Abilio

February 7, 2013 @ 4:20 pm

I bought Carol for 20 usd laste nite... she was pretty used...

drkam6

December 30, 2012 @ 12:02 am

And about the JP-8 vs JP-80: They are two completely different things. Again, I'm an oldtimer and I stick to my 14-bit JP-8, I simply don't like the JP-80 - or the whole "supernatural" cheap-software generation of Roland synths and fx boxes. Even if Roland would be going on the right path, it'll still take a lot of time to catch up with a true replica of a vintage synth. But in the meantime, there's a lot of hype - because hype sells, my friends.

drkam6

December 29, 2012 @ 11:57 pm

Interesting to read this discussion again after a year. I'm an oldtimer and I can tell you that when the Jupiter 8 came out, from my witnessing nobody felt aspiring at "true sounds" out of the machine. Back in '81 everyone wanted electronic sounds because new wave was at full steam. Everyone wanted to sound like OMD or DEVO. During those early days many didn't care about the JP-8 because Moog, ARP and Sequential were the kings and everyone wanted to get a Prophet 5. Also the Yamaha CS-80 was reigning supreme among polysynths.

roland fanboy

December 18, 2012 @ 10:34 pm

there's an awful lot of trolling going on in this discussion

Cleo Phatra

December 17, 2012 @ 1:51 am

Very believable Carol: The year you claim you bought it new, it was already at least several years old.

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