Jupiter X: A nice synth but could do better.

[Alazarin]

First off, I'm in for the long-haul as a former owner of a Jupiter 6 synth that I had to part company with after almost 30 years of daily use. This is not a drama diss to big up some other synth. This is meant as constructive criticism. I'll probably still be playing my Jupiter X in 20 years time.

The good side:

5 octaves, aftertouch, side-to-side pitchbend/mod, real-time front-panel control, arpeggiation that's incredibly flexible, multi-timbrality plus more virtual synths and effects built-in than you could shake a stick at! Solid metal construction! Woo-Hoo!!!

The bad side:

1: Inability to enable oscillator sync + xmod at the same time. That was a feature of both the Jupiter 8 & Jupiter 6 which created incredible harmonically rich waveforms. Arturia manage to enable that feature on their Jupiter 8 soft synth. Likewise Cherry Audio with their Mercury 6 'tribute' to the Jupiter 6. I know as I have both soft synths and owned a Jupiter 6 for almost 30 years. If Arturia and Cherry Audio can offer that functionality in their soft synths then surely Roland, who invented that feature, should be able to do likewise.

2: Oscillator sync to SuperSaw does not work. Why? It sure does on my little plastic SH-201.

3: No LFO to clock synchronisation on the SH-101 soft synth. Why??? It is a feature of the original SH-101. I should know as I owned two of them in the past and synchronising S&H LFO to the drum machine clock output was an integral part of my live sound back in the day. It could hardly take more than a few lines of code and an extra switch on the GUI to implement.

The request:

A Jupiter 6 soft synth! You know it makes sense. Sure, the Jupiter X soft synth is OK but let's be honest here, it's just a Virtual Analogue oscillator section bolted on to the good old JV-1080 synth engine with a bevvy of extra effects thrown in. I'd recognise that synth architecture anywhere.

A pressed-steel replacement pitchbend / mod plate would be nice. At the rate I'm going, I'll have worn through my plastic one in a few years' time.

Also, please fix the switchover between patches. Yeah, my playing is a bit messy live, but if I switch patches in the middle of a pichbend [yes, it happens more often than you might think] the old patch note[s] is/are left hanging wherever they were when I hit the patch-change. Never had that problem on my old Jupiter 6. Surely it can't be too hard to fix it so that the previous patch note tails continue to respond to pitchbend + modulation.

Anyhoo, that's all for now. I'll be playing my Jupiter X live in a few hours this evening :D