Michael's Texas Embrace

I am replacing my hack philisophical post with X-Treme Nerdiness. Yo.

On friday I drove to Houston and picked up a new synthesizer. Behold: (the colon is referring to the picture, so imagine the picture just suddenly appeared on the page before you, in a flash of blinding light.)

Buddha is sitting on the wood side paneling to illustrate that the Roland Juno 60 towers over all, even the enlightened lord.

It has pretty much everything a good synthesizer needs. Wood on the side is key. Another important question to ask when buying a synthesizer is, "does this machine have enough buttons, switches, and knobs that I could pretend I was a space captain or a scientist while I play it?" The Juno indeed has plenty of buttons, and can replicate the bewildering sound of science (which is usually fast beeps and whooshing static.)

As you can see, Gobo is excited about being able to play six (6) notes at once, because this synth is polyphonic! Sure, modern keyboards may let you play more than six notes at once, but who needs to do that? Jazz players? Classical pianists? Who plays any of that crap on a sweet synth? Losers. The 8-bit Nintendo couldn't play that many notes. And that was the peak of music.

So aside from buttons and wood, and being able to excite Fraggles, how does it sound? Way sweet 2 tha maxx. And since it has lots of buttons and sliders and switches, you can easily construct your own special sounds that annoy other people. And unlike the Moog, you can save your sounds (called "patches") and recall them at the press of a button! You can even save those patches if you run out of room, by plugging your keyboard into a cassette player and dumping the information on to a standard cassette. It sounds sort of like a modem on the tape. That was probably space-age stuff in 1982 (the year this synth was made.)

So I made a bunch of patches and then recorded them as a series of demos, because surely everyone wants to hear it. (As a note, there are no effects applied to any of the sounds. The synth makes all that noise itself.)

Juno Organ and Arp. Here's a pretty good hammond organ sound, some wicked 80s synth stings, and the far-out variable on-board arpeggiator. Whoa! Listen to those beeps!

Juno beep. I was trying to make it sound like a video game. So I played a little beepy pattern over and over and fiddled with the controls, so the sound sort of morphs as it goes along. Then I added some white noise (it has a white noise generator!), some spooky sort-of glockenspiel (with modulation), and a really sick-sounding lead. And some bubbly bass. It's sloppy, but I did all these really fast. Second takes are for sissies.

Juno Test #2. (Why is test #2 third in the list?) Cool synth bass sound, with a spooky sad part where the filter rises instead of falls. Weird lead sound. I programmed a synthy bass drum here, and then a crappy-sounding rim shot. But the fact that I can make up my own crappy-sounding drums is cool. And the sound is so robust, it doesn't ever really sound crappy.

Yep. This synthesizer makes me wonder why we bothered to move past the dazzling technology of 1982. New keyboards just don't do it like this. Unless you buy a really expensive one. But why do that when you can buy one of these for a fraction of the cost and get wood paneling? Sheesh.