BLAST FROM THE PAST: JUPITER-8
A lumbering behemoth, Roland’s ’s answer to the Prophet-5 became e a classic in its own right, helping g to define the sound of the 80s Roland Jupiter-8
Just as we put finger to key on this month’s Blast From the Past, Roland announced the SE-02, a fully analogue entry in their popular Boutique series and a collaboration with US analogue mainstays Studio Electronics. Surprisingly, Roland and SE have chosen to overlook the larger company’s legendary past catalogue and have instead cobbled together something that is very, well, American, bearing some resemblance to Studio Electronics’ own Minimoog-inspired heritage.
Despite the whelps of surprise currently echoing across synthesiser forums, this isn’t the first time Roland have turned to Yankee ingenuity for inspiration. Indeed, in its initial incarnation, one of the company’s most coveted classics was designed to compete with instruments from across the Pacific, and its now-legendary sound had much in common with them.
That instrument is the Jupiter-8, a synth that’s now seen as one of Roland’s crowning achievements. Though relatively few units were sold at the time, the JP-8 has since come to exemplify the pinnacle of polyphonic perfection.
Roland’s first volley in the war of polyphony was launched in 1978. Dubbed the Jupiter-4, it was relatively limited compared to the Sequential Circuits and Oberheims leading the charge. Though it cost far less than those instruments, it was quite expensive for a fourvoice, single-oscillator instrument, and sales were less than stellar.
It would take Roland three years to offer musicians a truly viable alternative to the likes of the Prophet-5. With eight dual-oscillator voices and sounds that could be split and layered across the keyboard, the Jupiter-8 had the voice count of a fully loaded Oberheim OB-Xa and was clearly positioned to compete with the Americans.
The JP-8’s architecture was not unlike that of its Yankee cousins, with dual oscillators offering triangle, pulse, square, and sawtooth waveforms (and noise for oscillator 2), plus an LFO, a resonant low-pass filter (that, like the one on the OB-Xa, could be switched between 12 and 24dB) and a pair of four-stage envelope generators. As Roland often did, they stuck a non-resonant high-pass filter into the works for good measure.
64 preset slots and eight combination slots made the Jupiter-8 an ideal tour companion (even if the poor tuning stability of the earliest models did not), and many a big name hauled the beast to stage and studio. Devout users included Greg Hawkes of the Cars, Tangerine Dream (natch!), Bryan Ferry, Thomas Dolby, Rush, Barry Andrews (Shriekback), and Ron Mael of Sparks. Michael Boddicker slathered JP-8 textures all over Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The sound of the Jupiter-8 was the epitome of ‘analogue mojo’, and it’s nigh on impossible to precisely reproduce. This accounts somewhat for the insane prices commanded by secondhand units. Just as they did 30 years ago, those who want a bit of Roland magic for less money often make do with one of Roland’s many follow-ups and spin-offs from the Jupiter line. The rest of us can look to samples and the many virtual polysynths inspired by the mighty Jovian Giant.