Saturday, April 2, 2011

Will the Real Roland Jupiter-80 Please Stand Up?

(Click picture to enlarge)

So yesterday's post about the upcoming Roland Jupiter-80 was obviously a joke. But as it turns out, details about the real deal have leaked, mostly by way of a scan from an upcoming issue of Keyboard magazine.

Disappointingly, it appears this is just another case of Roland bastardizing the name of one of its legendary synths as a marketing gimmick. The latest is that the Jupiter-80 will be a performance-oriented synth combining sampled sounds and physical modeling. Apparently, the sampled sounds, which Roland is referring to as "SuperNatural" are aimed at replicating the performance techniques of real-world, acoustic instruments via normal keyboard playing.

Obviously, this seems to be aimed at live performers, but can enough of them afford $4,000 for a workstation that doesn't even have a sequencer? I guess time will tell. Here's hoping the Korg Monotribe doesn't turn out to be a similar disappointment.

[via Gearslutz]

1 comment:

Joel R. Bisson said...

new Roland Synths are exciting to see, I want a SH-01 and a SH-201 before this though.

I'm tempted to buy one, due to the fact that it sounds amazing but it's similar to my Juno-G, in that it's sample based and not a pure analog synth with knobs and sliders, it's more of a performance keyboard at best.