Roland Jupiter-50: early impressions

[keybdwizrd]

 

I have spent hours recently - hours - playing and exploring this synthesizer.  And reading the f*cking manual.  And I call it a synthesizer, because that's what it mostly is.  It is not a traditional rompler workstation.  Well, it's not a workstation at all.

If I can make a halfway decent demo of the Jupiter-50, capturing the fun stuff I've been improvising in my little corner here, I think a lot of you will be impressed, and perhaps start GASSING for one.

Yes, the Jupiter-50 (and 80) have something like 70 "Supernatural" acoustic instruments.  (The Jupiter-80 and Jupiter-50 have the exact same sounds in them.)  The pianos are nicer than those on my MOX6, which has the same patches as the Motif XS series.  The electric pianos are also very nice - preferable to those in the Motif/MOX library.  The woodwinds and brass are excellent IMHO - when I play the soprano and alto saxes, they indeed have a way of sounding more "natural" than any others I've played.  Ditto for the muted trumpet.  Very musical.

I am NOT an organist, but there are a ton of organ presets, and I have to believe that most players would find some very usable sounds here.  If not, they can be tweaked... here's another nice thing - the factory presets are NOT engraved in stone - you can edit them and save them in their current spot without having to use up one of the user memory locations.

The strings are wonderful, and there's every useful pad you could possibly want.  Ditto for the basses.  There are lots of electric guitars - they are as good or better than any other synth guitars you've ever heard, but do people actually use these things?  There are a couple of nice flamenco guitars, but in general the acoustic guitars are the weakest of the bunch, and I'll need to create some patches from scratch of my own liking.

But, in the end, the acoustic "Supernatural" instruments probably make up less than 10% of what's in the new Juptiers.  Everything else is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of presets meant to emulate analog synths of all shapes and kinds and colors.  Indeed, there is an emphasis on emulating Roland analogs of the past, such as the original Jupiter-8 and the Juno keyboards.  I estimate that there are 1,500 - 2,000 presets in the Jupiter-50 meant to emulate vintage synths.

In Roland-speak, a "patch" is called a Live Set.  There are more than 2,000 Live Set presets in the new Jupes.  A Live Set can be made up by as many as four "Tones," and each Tone can be comprised by as many as four "Partials."  I think I have this straight.  In any case, this allows you to have MONTROUSLY HUGE stacked polysynth {censored} going on, if you want it.  There are probably more than 200 retro analogish poly brass Live Sets (think patches) alone, and hundreds of polysynth presets that are NOT part of the synth brass category.  There are also hundreds of leads - when was the last time you played a keyboard that had more than a dozen square wave lead presets alone? 

The number of synth presets (all editable) buried inside these things is STAGGERINGLY huge.  You don't realize this from the front panel, because those colored patch (oops, I mean Live Set) category buttons mostly refer to the acoustic-type sounds.  I assure you that 99% of the people (like me) who sit down at one of these things in a Guitar Center have NO IDEA how many sounds (and what type of sounds) are buried inside these keyboards.  I owned one for three days before I started to become aware of the immensity of what lay buried inside the Jupiter-50.

 

Well, I've written more than I intended, and it is getting late.  Here's an excerpt from a Sound-on-Sound review of the Jupiter-50:

"I fear that people don

[zoink]

 

From what you're saying, it sounds like Roland simply failed to communicate what the new Jupiters actually are.  I sat in Guitar Center on several occasions and played the Jupiter 80 at some length, and each time I left scratching my head.  Many of the sounds were pretty good as I recall, but the majority of people who are in the market to spend this kind of money are probably looking for something to use in the studio.  If they had built this concept into a true workstation, I think Roland might have had a worthy successor to the Fantom G (and a decent competitor for the Korg Kronos).

 

I still think that the biggest mistake Roland made with the Jupiter 80/50, given the quirky concept, is the control surface.  If it's really a deep and complex synthesizer after all, then for $3500 they should have given it a full panel of knobs.

 

My original impression after first hearing about it and then playing it was that it was less a descendant of the Jupiter series than of the D (and perhaps JD) series.  I'd probably pick up a JP-80 used if I found one for a good price, but I still think Roland made a huge blunder with this concept and feature set.

[Gribs]

I wonder who Roland thinks is their target customer. Maybe there is a disconnect there between their intended customer and their real customer, or maybe they sell most of their boards into markets that are not familiar. Maybe they are going after musicians who are fill in parts in wedding bands or pit orchestras or some Asian market where emulating various acoustic instruments is in vogue.

 

I have guessed that a lot of the guitar patches are used to fill in backing guitars that were overdubbed in a song. I know symphonic metal band keyboardists do that as well as fill in with orchestral sounds too. I can't understand why metal keyboardists like to solo with patches that sound very electric guitarish though - other than perhaps cutting through.

 

Are the analog emulation patches based on samples or are they generated using a VA synth engine?

[keybdwizrd]

---

zoink wrote:

 

I still think that the biggest mistake Roland made with the Jupiter 80/50, given the quirky concept, is the control surface.  If it's really a deep and complex synthesizer after all, then for $3500 they should have given it a full panel of knobs.

---

I absolutely agree 100\%.

Their late-in-the-game way of helping to make up for this is by releasing an iPad editor for the synth engine.

[keybdwizrd]

 

---

Gribs wrote:

 

 

 

Are the analog emulation patches based on samples or are they generated using a VA synth engine?

---

 

 

I am still not 100% sure myself.  Here's what they say:

"The JUPITER-80

[keybdwizrd]

 

---

Gribs wrote:

 

I wonder who Roland thinks is their target customer.

---

 

 

Very, very good question.

 

This board is really two instruments in one, and could have been sold as two different instruments.

 

First, you have the "rompler" aspect that models acoustic instruments mostly with samples.  This could make up an excellent keyboard in its own right, providing all of the pianos, elec pianos, organs, strings, brass, basses, etc.

 

Then there's the whole "virtual analog synth modeling" component or whatever you want to call it.  They could release this piece in an instrument unto itself, albeit not with a $2,000 - $3,000 price tag.

 

I think maybe they were building a rompler from scratch, and in addition to the acoustic stuff needed to include synth sounds as well (just like the workstations do).  Some guys in a lab somewhere started working on this piece and went nuts on this piece.  

 

So you have this massive "analog modeling synth engine" bolted alongside this very good acoustic modeling/sample-based engine.

 

Then, in the 50, you can program a "lower" tone (think bass sound) in whatever octaves you want, with a "solo" tone (think solo flute or non-complex synth sound) in whatever top octaves you want, with a complex "Live Set" in the middle, and store the whole thing as one of any of a dozen "Registrations."  The lower, middle, and upper sounds can all be programmed inside the registration to layer each other completely, if you want.  This is where Roland musters up the concept of a "performance instrument," whereby different sounds can be layered across different parts of the keyboard and stored for instantaneous recall.  But the lower and solo parts can only be "tones" and not the more complex Live Sets, so you really don't get three "complete" Jupiter-50's to play at the same time.  With the Jupiter-80 you can have TWO different Live Sets at the same time, which could result in even more monstrous multi-part layers.

 

But, as zoink pointed out, you do NOT get a whole bunch of knobs to control aspects of the sound in real time, as one might want to during a gig.  You get a filter cutoff knob and a resonance knob.  That's it.  You cannot control envelopes, effects, EQ, etc., without varying degrees of menu-diving.  I guess Roland expects you to have all of this figured out and stored in advance.

 

[Gribs]

That is interesting that the web site does not specifically state whether the sounds are made using the VA engine or whether they are sample-based.  I remember watching the videos when the "Synth Legends" tone set was released and discussed either here or elsewhere and thinking the patches sound good but not like perfect emulations;  I don't think this is really a problem.

 

FWIW, the front panel reminds me a bit of the Kronos in a way but with a Roland look.

 

Here is another question for you.  Does the Jupiter 50 (or 80) have a fan inside?  My Kronos fan makes a little noise which is just a little bothersome.  It doesn't bug me much as it is pretty quiet, but it is still one of those little things that I wish was not there.

[Bernard]

 

---

Gribs wrote:

 

 

That is interesting that the web site does not specifically state whether the sounds are made using the VA engine or whether they are sample-based.  I remember watching the videos when the "Synth Legends" tone set was released and discussed either here or elsewhere and thinking the patches sound good but not like perfect emulations;  I don't think this is really a problem.

 

FWIW, the front panel reminds me a bit of the Kronos in a way but with a Roland look.

 

Here is another question for you.  Does the Jupiter 50 (or 80) have a fan inside?  My Kronos fan makes a little noise which is just a little bothersome.  It doesn't bug me much as it is pretty quiet, but it is still one of those little things that I wish was not there.

---

 

 

Roland did a white paper on SN sound engines. IIRC it was when the SN expansions for the Fantom G were launched. So I guess they feel they have preached enough tech...

@ FAN, I believe that was confirmed as a NO FAN in the Jups back on the Roland Clan forum... Roland tend to make their own ASIC's and I guess these days when CPU horses are needed they probably embed such generic beasts on the ASIC chip to keep power, temp and costs down and more importantly make use of RISC tech to keep low latency... Although one guy has posted that if you run too many SN engines and layer them you can get some issues and he even suggested it states that in the manual. I hope he is not getting confused with the fatter Midi control message clogs that can affect sequencers if you send patch change data when midi is busy..  He could be on to something as no one seemed to dispute his post in a pro Roland forum..

[sweelinck]

This is an old thread, but for archival purposes, I thought I would add that the Jupiter-50 and Jupiter-80 each actually have 3 sound engines:

 

1. Supernatural rom samples of acoustic instruments and some vintage organs;

2. Virtual analog synthesizer;

3. Clonewheel B3 and leslie emulator;

 

The synthesizer and drawbar organ sounds builtin to the keyboards are just libraries of sounds for those two sound engines.

 

These keyboards have a staggering number of builtin sounds, and the ability to do whatever you want with the VA synth and clonewheel. These keyboards did not sell particularly well because people would sit down in a store and call up the patches programmed into the multicolored patch buttons and think this was a really limited synthesizer.

 

In fact, the variety of sounds is staggering, and the overall quality of the sounds is excellent.

[theGman]

I love my J50; I bought it, and use it as a gigging keyboard. My 2 regrets are: I wish it had the harmonica sound from the VR09 instead of what it has, and I wish it had "blowing wind" sound.

[Crazyfoo]

I bought a Jupiter 80 when it first came out and got rid of it about 2 months later.

The learning curve of figuring it out is staggering and even trying to get support from Roland on how to use the thing is an exercise in futility.

It's like their engineers said "Lets make this as complicated as possible to use" and they succeeded.

Never again.

[JazzMastaJim]

I bought a Jupiter 50 in 2013 (?) and use it as my main -- and usually only -- gigging keyboard. It replaced an Alesis QS8.1 which I still love, but it weighs more than 3X as much as the JP-50 and was starting to have some reliability issues (not good for an orphaned product!).

 

Overall, the Jupiter 50 is an excellent instrument for live use, except that going from one Registration or Live Set to another is not easy enough or quick enough when you're trying to keep people on the dance floor. So for that, I use an old (ca. 1985) Alesis MMT-8 sequencer with the control changes, patch changes, etc. for each song programmed in. Now if I could only fold up the Jupiter 50 so it would fit in the back of my Mini Cooper...

[1001gear]

Here's at least one Jupiter 8. Two KBoarders. Solo @ 1:55 ish. I presume this is the legendary article.

 

[video=youtube;VuIgy1NHaWk]

[Phil O'Keefe]

Test post - checking the italics...

[mshifflett]

I bought the Jupiter 80 just after they came out. I agree with what others said, it was maybe confusing as to which market it was supposed to attract. For me it is a live board. The factory patches are okay but there is much more to get out of the thing than meets the eye. Once you get past the learning curve, which isn't really that bad if it's not your first rodeo, you can create some pretty useful sounds.

 

That being said, I still want a Kronos as well to add to the collection

[sweelinck]

Can't disagree on the complexity of using these keyboards. There is a learning curve and preparation time to get it configured so that the sounds you want are easily recalled with the soft registration or patch/live-set buttons, but once you decide on a paradigm and configure it, it becomes much more straightforward to use. I prefer an instrument to do one or a few things well and have a very intuitive interface. But it is alot easier to travel with a Jupiter-50 than a collection of instruments. Once 3 sound engines and over 2000 sounds are shoehorned into a moderately small keyboard, complexity of user interface is inevitable.

 

What makes it worth it is Roland used the same DSP hardware as in the Jupiter-80, so sound quality is the same. Often, keyboard companies use lower quality DACs and lower quality op-amps for the output stage in the cheaper siblings of pro-oriented keyboards so that you may get the same sounds as the more expensive sibling, but not the same audio quality. Not so with the Jupiter-50.