I hooked a Delay pedal up to mine and its just such a beautiful and lush sounding instrument to my ears. The smallest adjustment to the lfo can send the filter when adjusted into an entirely different direction sonically. There are basically 15 sliders to work with, but they each interact with eachother in a way that no other synth i have used does as well. Its so easy to use and yet so deceptively intricate if that makes any sense. I recently picked one of these up and I couldnt be happier. I like Junos but I grew tired of them when I got other synths, tonally I prefer stuff like Polysix, and feature wise I prefer JX-3P (while still having some of the Juno character/sound and Roland DCO thing). What it does do (as we slutz know) is add that vintage cool and 'badge honor' and that's where a lot of the money goes in buying one, and that's fair enough, maybe there should be another rating added for that more emotional appeal because Juno 60 would score highly on that for sure, but bang for buck? 4! Juno 60 is over priced for what it does (i.e bang for buck) so 4 only here. My Juno 6 cost around £60 in the early 90s - a bargain by today's standards. See last part of last paragraph, same applies. A real instrument but way over hyped and that is factored in at the prices these go for it's hard to justify that price for such a limited synth. 60 is the best Juno imo, but it IS only a Juno. I would score the Juno 6 lower (but still higher than the 106).
Overall 8.įeatures? Enough to be handy but not enough to be interesting after the romance has worn off (I had a Juno 6 for a few years - pretty much the same but not as good as lack of patch storage WAS annoying even on a simple synth). A more advanced synth that is 'easy to use' should score higher here. So quality is an 8 but quality of a variety of sounds is only a 6 = 7.Įase of use? Simple, great but then it's a simple synth. Sound - 8 undeniably a sweet sound, but really overused, very constrained with little room to go off road (Roland purposely restricted the range of it so that it always sounded 'sweet' which has the side effect of it pretty much making the same patches over and over for the last 30 years). Technically speaking, Juno 60 already has external control available, only thing required is to convert it to the MIDI standard via MIDI/DCB converter, or to go with something like the Minerva upgrade. Luckily there are few solutions / upgrades available now at the market which make life easier. I personally prefer to use it for pads only (with partly closed filter), and absolutely never use it for bass or arpeggio stuff.Įxternal MIDI control is a must have for this unit. It will do magic on some applications, but if overused, tends to make all the patches sound the same.
When you lay down the 1/16ths via the arpeggio, this thing works like a super-fast die cutter.Ĭhorus on this unit is sort of a double sided sword. It's the same envelope chip as used in the flagship Jupiter 8.
Particularly when compared to software envelopes of that age. Rather than being software controlled as on the other Roland DCO synths, this one uses hardware chip IR3R01, making it brutal fast and snappy. What makes Juno 60 a killer synth actually lies right at the end of its front panel controls next to the chorus buttons, and that is the envelope. And it will squelch nicely when pushed high. Instead of just adding the 'liquid' part of the resonance, this one colors the affected frequency band in a very pleasant way. Still, its filter sounds fantastic and is in fact one of my favorite sounding filters. Too bad there's no 12dB tap point at the filter stage, this would make some really exotic PWM pads for which Juno 60 is known (in combination with its killer Chorus).
I gave 5/10 for the features, since it's obviously a single oscillator structure, with one filter and a single envelope. Highly recommended for anyone starting to learn how synthesizers work. Plain simple to learn the basics of subtractive synthesis. Can't be more logical laid out control, can't be more simple to work with. When ever a beginner would ask for the first synth recommendation, my answer would be Juno 60. What makes Juno 60 special is its user interface.
The part that i will focus in here is the analogue signal path that starts at the oscillator point - therefore, from this perspective, i will call Juno 60 an analogue synth. Both answers are actually correct, depending from which angle we look at the problem. Many spears needlessly got broken in debates whether Juno 60's oscillators are analogue or digital.