This is an overview of the luscious vintage synth, the Roland Juno-60:

The Roland Juno-60 is a classic six voice polyphonic analog synthesizer with RAM memories for 56 sounds. The sound architecture is rather basic, but it has an excellent sound and was used by many professionals like Eurythmics, Howard Jones, the Madonna producers, Paul Van Dyk and many more… it has the DCB interface – the predecessor of MIDI. With a DCB to MIDI interface it is very easy to integrate the instrument in a midi setup.

To my ears the JUNO-60 sounds far better than the very similar JUNO-106 (I had both). It has snappier envelopes and a fater chorus. However, sound is a matter of taste…

Description:

The Roland Juno-60 is an analog synthesizer produced by Roland Corporation in the early 1980s and a successor to the slightly earlier Juno-6.

Like its predecessor, the Juno-60 has some digital enhancements, used for clocking the oscillators and for saving/loading patches. This instrument was succeeded by the Roland Juno-106 in 1984.

Details on the Roland Juno-60 below.

If you’ve used the Juno-60, leave a comment!

Specifications:

• 6 voice polyphony
• DCO: pulse, saw, and square
• LFO – rate and delay
• Non-resonant high pass and resonant low pass filter
• VCA – level, ADSR and gate
• 61 note keyboard (no velocity or aftertouch)
• DCB Roland to Roland sync/interface (Roland MD-8 converts DCB to MIDI for MIDI control)

Resources:

• Roland Juno-60 on WikiPedia
• Retrosound’s Juno-60 goodies
• VintageSynth’s coverage of the Juno-60
• Juno-60 pages at WebFrontier

via AnalogAudio1