Juno 60 and Doepfer in perfect harmony
The Roland Juno-60 is a popular analogue 61-key polyphonic 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 only for clocking the oscillators and for saving/loading patches. The Juno-60 synthesizer is a six-voice polyphonic synthesizer. The single digitally-controlled oscillator (or DCO for short) per voice gave the Juno-60 a high degree of stability in maintaining tune; most analogue voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) of the time would tend to drift in pitch and require re-tuning of the oscillator. The DCO provides sawtooth and square/pulse waveforms as a sound source, in addition to white noise and a square-wave suboscillator pitched one octave beneath the key played. Both of these additional sources can be mixed in with dedicated sliders.
The filters and envelope on the Juno-60 rely on control voltages sent by depressing the keys on the keyboard and were thus analogue. The Juno-60 features a rather distinctive-sounding 24 dB/octave lowpass filter with resonance. Unlike other VCF’s of the day, the Juno-60’s is capable of self-oscillation and thus could be used to some degree as a tone generator in and of itself. The filter section also features controls for envelope amount and polarity, LFO modulation, and keyboard tracking. In addition, a three-position non-resonant highpass filter is provided to thin out lower frequencies.
The signal is then sent through a voltage-controlled amplifier (or VCA) and a simple four-stage ADSR filter envelope. The Juno-60 provides limited options for modulating the audio signal. A single triangle-wave variable-rate LFO is provided as a modulation source; this can be mixed into the DCO to create vibrato or into the lowpass filter to generate a tremolo effect. The LFO can either be triggered manually by the left hand using a large button above the pitch bend lever or set to engage automatically whenever a key was pressed.
In this video:
Various Roland Juno 60 chords are being sent to the Doepfer A 119 module and then shaped and processed through the A121 Multi Mode Filter, which in turn is being modulated by the A 115 Sequencer.
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