Roland JD800

Added: 18-Dec-98 | Author: admin | New price: Out of production | S/H price: Ł 500 ish ??

Company Link: ROLAND UK | Company Link: ROLAND USA |

Category: Gear / synth / digital/sample

Roland JD800

The JD800 is a digital synth utilising sampled waveforms stored in ROM from which the unit synthesises it's sounds.... It came out a few years ago now, and was an early taste of the barrage of knobs/analog synths that has since followed, and an excellent digital synth it is too fi you want something to create synth sounds with brillaint visual & physical editing......

There's a choice of 108 source waves....devided into 13 Analog waves.......22 digital waves......10 samples......16 percussion samples.....9 overtones....4 piano's......17 attack transients....6 wind samples.....9 noise.....& 2 effect samples....You can also add waveforms from rom plug-in cards......This is not an analog synth......and sounds pretty much like other digital sampled-wave synths...but you do get all the control parameters laid out with 69 dedicated knobs & sliders on the front panel all for editing & sending out recordable sysex.....

Sounds are built into patches...each can contain up to 4 tones or raw waves, which you can edit with all the controls....If you want to edit 2 or more tones the same, you just punch in the tones you want, then all the edits you make are universal...or you can edit them independently....which is useful to quickly set the same filter on two tones that make up a patch for example......In a way, this is similar to the Novation basstation, in that if you switch to a new patch, the knobs & sliders do not reset to different positions...so you can tweak a filter knob, and find it has taken an enormous leap from the saved patch setting.....Therefore it's really a digital synth with a built in hardware control unit for editing & realtime control.........

all the synthesis is also digital. The digital filters are the same as those used on the S770 & 750 samplers, and the D70 & MV30....You get Low-pass, band-pass, & high pass....all with resonance and with a fixed 5 stage envelope as well as other usual filter assignments.....these are pretty powerful filters Y'all.....Rolands digital filters have always been nice....

You get 2 LFO's each with a choice of 5 waveforms....one of the LFO variables besides the usual rate & delay is "Fade", which allows the oscillator to fade in cycles between the two primary DCO waveforms to create crossfades.........

The JD800 is 24 note poly....5 part multitimbrel + drum mode, & has a comprehensive FX unit built in....There's only about 64 internal ram patch storage positions & 64 Rom....

All in all a bit of a mixed bag.... it doesn't really have the expandability or power of something like a JV1080....there are no drums really in the JD800 for example, just some percussion stuff although you could get a plug-in drum card...but that's more expense if you can find one ....the JD also lacks full multitimbrality.....so it's not a workstation type unit .....But for dance !..... dance uses less parts, and the knobs and other facilities make it a good bet.....

It's a quality digital synth with analog "styled" programming......I think Roland sold alot 'cos it looked analog at a time when people were starting to be affected by the analog retro-thang.......This synth will make some really nice sounds......it will allow you to get into some really in-depth synthesis on a digital machine that would be hard to programme with the usual archaic menues & sub-menues and gives you excellent realtime control than would be available on a menu driven unit.....Plus... you get a master keyboard !!....you can always rempa the controllers in your s/w to suite other synths...

So I would say in conclusion that there are more analog sounding units around, .......or if you want a powerful digital synth there are more comprehensive units around, that will give you all the functions you need including drums & full multitimbrelity, but would be harder to programme, slower to work maybe, and also maybe not as immeadiate & ...fun !......It must be said tho', that the JD's sounds whilst few are all well usable even before editing, and there no tubas, violas & french horns to wade thru...it's all synth!!.......

It's fair to say that the JD800 is not as upront and "analog" as stuff out there now... but a good item to center a system round where you want synth sounds with creative editing & realtime tweaking ....and enuff multi-parts to do a track justice, and editing facilities well beyond the norm for creating cool exclusive edits !!