Roland Jupiter-4 40th anniversary extended demo

Published on Jun 30, 2019 synthlegends

"I know this demo is long, maybe much too long. It was difficult to decide, what I can erase. Finally I decided to make a long demo and give a small schedule, so you can choose, what kind of sounds you are interested in.

The Roland Jupiter-4 is a very strong, agressive, massive, but also sweet sounding synth. The sound is really incredible for only one VCO with one Sub-VCO. In this this Demo you will listen to this wide range of sounds.

The Roland JP-4 came out 1978, mine is from Nov. 1979 with the later filter board.

The great features of the JP-4 are:
- extremely fast envelopes
- ultra fast LFO and also slow LFO to get FM sounds and very slow filter sweeps as well
- fantastic sounding filter with ultra fat and sweet self resonance
- stereo chorus, not so strong like in the Juno 6/60, but very musical
- nice arpeggiator with triggering by a sequencer or drum machine
- random S/H filter modulation
- fantastic versatile bender board
- you can trim the 4 voices and slightly detune them on the back of the unit to achieve a really fat sound
- polyphonic portamento

Here is a schedule for getting quick access to the different parts in this video:
0:00 Part 1. Lovely Pads with resonance
3:20 Part 2. Arpeggio fun with different sounds
12:13 Part 3. Aggressive bass sounds
15:25 Part 4. Weird and angry fx sounds
23:17 Part 5. Strings and Pads
33:52 Part 6. Sweet melodies
41:11 Part 7. Orchestral string sounds
45:55 Part 8. Portamento and modulations

I used as FX a GFI Clockwork Delay Pedal, nothing else. There is no additional mastering or equalizing. I think the JP-4 sounds very dry, so a bit delay or reverb is necessary.

Thanks for watching this ultra long video. I hope you enjoy it.
Cheers."