Roland Jv 1080 Pc Editor Full 42MB Of

Today, secondhand JV-1080s are readily available and for very little money (between 125 and 185).

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Indeed, though synthesists have been begging the company for decades to return to its analogue roots, the Rolands flagship synths are still sample-based, with new variations trundling out of its factories with some regularity.

It should come as no surprise that the company would choose such a path.

Its classic analogue instruments may be beloved, but they didnt wear out any cash registers in their day.

Consider the mighty Jupiter-8 - a legend, yes, but a mere 2000 of em were sold.

The more successful Juno-106 managed to convince 40,000 customers to open their wallets, but its sales paled in comparison to that of the sample-based D-50, which sold five times that number.

Similarly, the company rolled out 100,000 MT-32s, a barebones collection of multisampled instruments that would set the stage for later General MIDI boxes.

Read more: Roland TB-303 Software Bass Line The D-50 and MT-32 were released in 1987.

Limited by the technology of their day, they offered lo-fi samples with a slathering of grainy reverb to hide glaring 8-bit artefacts and egregious loop points.

Instant classics, the D-50 and MT-32 set the blueprint for the deluge of ROMplers that would soon overtake the shops.

Keep em comin From a marketing standpoint, the ROMpler was nothing short of brilliant.

Roland was happy to oblige with a steady stream of new and improved models.

Each years model sported more ROM, more sounds, more patches, more programmability, and better effects.

By the time of the JV-1080s release in 1994, one could expect CD-quality samples and multi-megabyte memory.

Roland Jv 1080 Pc Editor Full 42MB Of

In fact, the JV-1080, which was priced at 1,085, included a whopping 640 patches across 8MB of sounds, expandable to a full 42MB of samples via optional slot-in cards.

The 2U rack-mountable JV-1080 offered quite a bit more than mere sample playback.

Each voice consisted of a sample-based oscillator, dual LFOs, and multimode resonant filter.

Patches could be sweetened with the obligatory reverb and chorus effects, alongside any of the 40() onboard insert effects.

These included pitch-shifter, ring modulator, phaser, tempo delay, rotary speaker, and many more.

With 64-voice polyphony and 16-part multitimbral operation, the JV-1080 became a fast favourite among soundtrack composers, thanks in no small part to the many excellent presets devised by future Spectrasonics mainman Eric Persing.

With so many excellent sounds available and a vast and flexible synthesis architecture under the hood, its no surprise that the JV-1080 was a success.

Though Roland released a number of successors, it remained in its catalogue for an astonishing six years.