Roland Juno D question!!

[EdKeys]

Hello, am seriously planning to buy Juno D, am very intersted in new sounds and good lead patches. I really think this is the keyboard I need considering that its not very expensive. Could anyone tell me something about this board.... pls maybe someone who has actually played it. Am also intersted in knowing a little more about the computer software

Thanks!!

[Spacehog]

I've played it, although I don't have one (yet). I think for the price it can't be beaten... it sounds great, looks great and has a quite reasonable action. The realtime control features make it very flexible, and it's also really light for carrying around, which is a bonus. Drawbacks - it's not expandable, and it has a wallwart power supply. As with all Rolands, from what I gathered you're also limited in user preset space to one bank of 128 patches (I'm used to 4 banks on my E-MU's)

For me personally, if/when I get one it'll sit on a secondary stand, along with perhaps a Micron or something similar. There are other boards I'm interested in too, the Novation KS4 (yes it's flawed, but as far as I can tell the problems are mostly sequencer / multitimbral related, which I don't want it for) and a Yamaha S03... I could get all 4 of these boards, plus a third stand, for less than half the cost of my drum kit, or less than the price of a Fantom X6 or a Motif ES. And they're all nice sounding, fairly nice playing and (by most accounts - there are always bad 'uns out there) pretty reliable.

Leanne's the person to ask about the JunoD though, she has one...

Martin

[Jakob]

Juno-D is a really good board. The lead patches is what I like the most. It's very easy to make your own lead sunds sound good.

As spacehog said, its very light. Im just putting it on my back in its bag and carries it to school without any problems.

[EdKeys]

thanks for the information guys... I have a 800-1300 budget, do u think theres a better board for the $$, am looking for LEAAAAADSs, thats why I chose this board, but maybe am wrong. So does anyone have any opions to help me??

thankss.

ed

[kevmo_fan]

Yeah, Martin has pretty much covered most of it... the 128 user patches basically is the only real drawback. I also find the constantly flashing metronome irritating... lol. Maximum polyphony is 64 voices... that could be seen as a drawback if you're used to 128 voice polophony as I am. As always with Roland, the pitch bend/modulation lever has a really nice smooth feel (big improvement on the older models I can tell you! LOL) Great for leads, and there are some GREAT lead sounds on it... You can make great leads from there too if you don't like em.

[EdKeys]

thanks for the info, am so anxious, am also looking at the fantom Xa, the price is alot higher but I think its worth the money. Am reading that the fantom Xa has sampler, I have a friend that has both dereks monster lead on a triton studio and jr liquid tenion lead on a kurzweil, do u know If i can copy them into fantom xa??

[Shreddy]

I'm not sure but I think the Juno D is using the synth engine from the RS boards if so its not as powerful for layering tones vs the Super JV engine (JV,XP,XV etc..). If you want more out of the board you might want to consider some older Rolands.

Regarding user banks on the XV-88 I have the User bank (128) and 8(x128) card banks mapped from my SmartMedia card. My SM card is only 8Meg and I have 30 custom saved banks out there that I can map to the the buttons. Its quite a nice option to have. The synth engine allows me to layer/split 16 patches (each of which contain 8 waveforms). The other nice thing about the board is the keyboard can be split into 16 MIDI zones.

The XV88 was too heavy to lug to rehearsals so I just recently got a XP-30. I'm so pleased with this board, it has 3 expansion cards built into it, Orchestra, Techno (some useful waveforms for tone creation) and Session. As with the Juno-D 128 User patches is limited. But if your looking for a powerful synth to complement a setup look into the XP-30 there are lots of them on sale on ebay, I got mine kinda high at $425 with shipping.

Ed

[Drusillus]

One thing I do know, is that the Juno-D only has two tones per patch as opposed to the four found in the Super-JV family. And it only has 1 MFX in Performance mode I believe.

It was reviewed in one of the very recent Sound On Sound magazines, they gave it a positive review, recommending it as a good first synth, or an "extra" synth. They did mention that it's not very powerful in the programming department, but that it is the cream of the crop in Roland's budget line of starter synths.

Edit: woo hoo post #400 :D