Saturday Synth Porn: The Roland Juno 2012 is a custom, hot-rodded keyboard, created by Audio-presto (Alan Dicker) by combining a pair of Roland Juno 106’s into one monster synth.
Here’s what he’s got to say about the Roland Juno 2012:
The Juno 2012 is two Roland Juno 106’s in a custom case, giving the Juno 2 parallel oscillators, LFO’s Envelopes and filters per voice, Front panel fine-tuning for each synth provided and then running through parallel filters with a cross fading mix control.
One runs as a master synthesizer and one as a slave, you can edit both from the master panel or with the different setting of the rear function switch you can edit separate patches on each. these both run through the same chorus and jack board for a full stereo mix out at the rear and you can set each to a different midi channel for multi timbrel control. Also added is polyphonic filter frequency modulation of the master synthesizer’s filters using the slaves synthesizers voices as mixable modulation sources. This pushes the sound creation potabilities of the Juno-2012 far beyond its original design.
via Sonic State
awesome
Very interesting visually and from the sonics….useful. But honestly…..how is this much different than say combining a keyboard synth that also had a corresponding module with onboard controls. That way you could midi control the module from the main keyboard or control the module manually.
The crossfading mix control could be done in my scenario through running the separate outputs from the keyboard and the module into a mixer.
The polyphonic filter frequency modulation of the master keyboard of the slave’s voices is a very nice touch….not easily duplicated with my above solution. Good engineering on that one.
A unique solution that I think could be fairly well, but not completely, replicated by a master keyboard / module solution. None the less….this is excellent engineering and the sound is the proof…..well done.
roland please start making these! roland really needs to get back in the analog game. bring back the juno!
Danny, sure you could achieve similar results with a synth and a module. I do just that with an alpha Juno with an mks 50 as slave, both controled by a bcr 2000. But that’s not the point. There are creative people out there who love the aesthetics and functionality of old school hardware with it’s per parameter control, etc. Creative people tend to do what others find pointless, but this process bears fruit for the creator most of the time, and occasionally for the rest of us. It’s like asking-why would someone paint a picture when they could snap a photo? Consider the art spirit as motive. This guy should be proud.
I meant no offense. Indeed, twice, I stated how well I thought the engineering and sound production was.
Here….
“The polyphonic filter frequency modulation of the master keyboard of the slave’s voices is a very nice touch….not easily duplicated with my above solution. Good engineering on that one.”
And here….
“None the less….this is excellent engineering and the sound is the proof…..well done.”
I was simply making a statement for those of us less fortunate to have, not one, but TWO Juno 106’s at our disposal AND the electrical engineering know how to do what Alan did, to take his other suggestions….such as layering of voices and filters….cross fading…outputting out of same jacks…..etc…etc. and adapt it to a setup that someone may already have….such as my suggested keyboard master to identical module slave model.
That”s all. Once again….all props to Alan for a wonderful piece of engineering and sound production.
I wondered about the viability of such a machine when I was rebuilding my 106 a couple of years ago (3 VCF chips died at once >.<). The only thing that stopped me trying was the lack of a second 106. A patch bay would be ideal, using the slave unit's EG and LFO as extra modulation sources, but the way this guy seems to have done it seems to be very versatile without one.