Please note that there are several links on this page within the text...
these should appear in your browser in either a different colour or underlined...

The Roland JP8000 is a worthy ancestor of Roland's earlier JUPITER series of analogue synthesisers. The analogue method of synthesis relies on the simple addition of basic tones followed by the subtraction of selected harmonics via filters coupled to waveform envelope generators and voltage controlled amplifiers. Sounds complicated!!! It wasn't actually as bad as it sounds and lovely, fat timbres were the norm with these sorts of synthesiser. Everything has a down side though and the trade off was that they were cumbersome beasts, big and heavy, and notoriously unstable, going out of tune at the drop of a hat! With the advent of digital techniques and FM, analogues became largely extinct; a sort of musical dinosaur of their day.

But you can't keep a good sound down and the  relatively recent upsurge of interest in things retro has prompted several manufacturers to recreate the gendre without the intrinsic analogue foibles. The result, Analogue Modelling, is a veritable electronic Jurassic Park and the JP8K as it is affectionately known to it's followers, is one of the prime examples of the gendre.

The host of control knobs on the front panel make this a most attractive instrument both to look at and as a sound creation medium. It is extensively employed right across the entire spectrum of the music industry today, from  Jean Michel Jarre to The Prodigy. Very comprehensive control facilities make this keyboard a joy to play. A combined pitchbend and modulation lever sits above an assignable ribbon controller; that and assignable velocity combined with the facility for external pedal control makes it a doozy!!! All that, a split keyboard and one of the most comprehensive arppegiator's I ever saw! What more could you want.........? A Prophet 10 perhaps? No,  far too hissy with all those discreet components, and way too unreliable!!!

Let's sneak a peak at what it will do now - by the way, don't expect too much from the audio clips, they are limited severely by the encoding techniques used for the net as are most of our audio clips. So here is an early synth chart topper called "Popcorn"  which Jean Michel recorded in his days before Oxygene - we recorded this version back in 1998....