Curious branding decisions, Roland dept
So Roland announced their latest Juno synthesizer, the Juno Stage. It’s another rompler, this time more performance oriented. Roland have a long history of making good romplers. I have not played extensively with the new Junos myself, but friends who have them assure me they are worthy additions. However.
Why would they resurrect the Juno name for these? The original Juno was an afforable analog polysynth. People interested in a Juno 60 or Juno 106 today are most likely:
- Collectors who want a Juno because of its place in history;
- VA synthesists who want to add some genuine analog flair on the cheap; or
- Mad scientists who want to abuse the CV inputs.
The new Junos, on the other hand, appeal to people who want to get some decent keys, pads, and other classic rompler sounds. No doubt the two groups overlap somewhat, but I suspect not too much.
The best analogy I can come up with is that the Juno 60 was a budget alternative to the Jupiter-8, while the modern Junos are budget alternatives to the Fantom family.
July 1st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Wow, that “mad scientist” video is amazing.
July 1st, 2008 at 5:44 pm
That’s Aaron in the video btw.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I got my father a Juno-D (the lowest-end of the Juno romplers) for some important occasion or other. It’s definitely not the kind of gear you want to do serious recordings with but it has some very nice features for live performance.
First, it’s light-weight, while still being solid construction. the keys feel very nice, not weighted at all but still with some tactile response that is both intuitive and not a strain on the muscles. Then there are all the surface controls, You’ve got knobs for cutoff, resonance, mix (between the two base samples that make an instrument). On top of that you’ve got the D-Beam ™ which you can assign to anything (granted, this thing’s mostly a gimmick, but whatever, it’s one more control option). There’s also split-keyboard capability and phrasing (hit one key and it makes a chord, fully programmable for each key, etc).
The sounds on the keyboard start off not particularly interesting, but the mere fact that you can combine two sounds to make your own instrument, combining that with EQ and other effects for each sound, you can create some interesting things with a little bit of sit-down programming (comes with librarian/editor software).
Also programmable are the instrument-category buttons. You can set the keyboard to “gig mode” and have a dozen favorite instruments at the ready.
So, that’s just the Juno-D model, the runt of the litter. The price is low, the contruction is Gig-worthy, and you can make expressive stuff with it - not too bad.
Long verbiage spewed, I’m agreeing that they could have come up with another name for these new toys rather than stain the almighty JUNO.