A 6-voice
polyphonic analog synthesizer with very
limited MIDI support.
The
Roland JP-6 has two
CEM 3340 VCOs per
voice. VCO1 is
switchable between any
combination of
triangle,
sawtooth,
pulse and
square waveforms, and has a
range of four
octaves. VCO2 replaces the square waveform with a
noise generator and has a six octave range. The
oscillators can be
cross-
modulated, and also
synchronized to each other. Either or both of them can be modulated by the two
LFOs or one of the two
ADSR envelope generators.
The
VCF in Jupiter-6 is an
interesting one.
It is a
multi-
mode filter with either 4-
pole lowpass, 4-pole highpass or 2-pole bandpass. The filter is
resonant on all modes, which provides some
unique sounds as resonant highpass filters are quite
rare.
The VCF can be modulated by either one of the envelopes, the LFO and
keyboard tracking.
In
addition to two polyphonic modes, the second one being there for use with
portamento, there's also a
monophonic solo mode with two oscillators for each voice. But what's better is the
solo unison mode with
whopping 12 VCO:s at once! Also present is the
unison mode, which
starts with six voices and
divides them as you
play more
notes.
The
initial MIDI support vas very
weak, with only notes and
program change. Later
versions of the JP-6 improved this a little, allowing it to power up in POLY instead of OMNI mode, and
receive on two
channels for the
upper and
lower part of a
split.
Production period:
1983
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