JP80 - hugely disappointed with it.

From what I can see, this thread continues to be right on topic
Lol

Bloody well right!

I forgot one... :-D

The Dude abides (just don't play the freakin' Eagles man!)[attachment: imagesCAPHWRHS.jpeg]

SoundworldA.D. wrote:

Good one Dany. An ode to "thinking outside of the box."

knolan wrote:

...I'd have to revoice this thing from scratch to make it useful to my purposes, and that's not going to happen as I don't have the time or inclination...

Kevin.

Kevin Nolan
Mars, A Cosmic Stepping Stone
Uncovering Humanity’s Cosmic Context

http://www.knect.ie/mars/

As his amazing book reveals, Kevin is obviously "thinking outside of the box"! But why for heaven's sake not with his JP-80?

Your quote puzzles me too, Dany. The Kronos is filled with a lot of fluff patches too, though in poking through the categories, I did come across a bunch of music fodder that would help me not have to program something.

Still, from my admittedly too brief encounter with a Jupiter at a music store that actually had one on display, the Tones seemed to me to offer a great selection of basic sounds to play with. Maybe he meant the Live Sets and Registrations, which I would have to say is full of overly gushing padderie and self playing arpeggiationalism. Not sure how many Live Sets there are, but there are only 32 Registrations.

I never did get around to clearing out my Triton when I had one, had all those similar Tritony sounds all over the place, though it never hurt my feelings or anything. I guess Kevin is content to have one Kronos to rule Time and Space with. ;-)

synthguy99 wrote:

Not sure how many Live Sets there are, but there are only 32 Registrations.

That's been probably only Bank [01]A to D, the JP80 has 8 Registration sets, 4 sets filled x 32 (A1 to D8) = around 128 Registrations x 4 livesets (upper, lower, drum and solo out of 2361 tones where upper and lower can have 4 tones per liveset , drum and solo only have one tone)
if i tell it the good way :)
I think this out the manual is a good help:

Maybe he meant the Live Sets and Registrations, which I would have to say is full of overly gushing padderie and self playing arpeggiationalism. Not sure how many Live Sets there are, but there are only 32 Registrations.

I think someone must have went in and deleted a lot of the Reg's on that JP-80!! Yikes!

Kevin, in his original post understands the architecture of the Jupiter-80 quite well...and that is where the rub comes in. His frustration was with the sheer complexity of the Partial/Tone/Live Set/Registration design when all he wanted was to play singles.

I hate the Registration-Liveset-Tone architecture. It is overbearingly complicated and I can never, ever see myself getting into that when all I want is Tones. I need a Tone play mode!

- The Operating System is ridiculously complicated by comparison to the V-SynthGT, for example. On the V-Synth it's like Russian Dolls - clear and obvious levels within levels - nothing hidden and everything in its logical place. With the JP, there are pages and layers and levels all over the place. Functionality that should happen once is duplicated on multiple levels. Ridiculous.

If you read his entire post, every point he made (well, maybe with the exception of there being not a single Reg that was useable...can't agree with that one!) was to the point and made you think, "well, yeah, it is kind of confusing when you think of it."

For me, I like dealing with single Live Sets (either an Upper or a Lower), which gives the ability to layer from 1 to 4 tones. You can't help but be impressed when you get those lovely cascading and swirling textures on a Live Set like "JP80-Vox1" but also realize real quick that there are a whole lot of parameters to deal with if you start mangling. If you are not keenly aware of all of them and how they relate, it is a bit overwhelming at first.

But that is where I will take the time to learn it, because once you do, you will be rewarded with some of those "oooh and aaah" moments. That Tone Blender is a real gas!

Mars is certainly closer to Jupiter than Earth is!! ;-D

synthguy99 wrote:

Not sure how many Live Sets there are, but there are only 32 Registrations.

Repost from another thread:

Dany wrote:

trommis wrote:

Today memory chips are really cheap. I wonder why Roland let us run out of memory for livesets/sounds in a $3000 machine, that's supposed to be "top of the line" in 2012...

zardoz505 wrote:

If the jupiter didn't sound so good this memory shortfall would put it on
craigslist...

JP-80 Memory:....2048 Tone Slots.......2560 LiveSet Slots........257 Registration Slots

OASYS Memory:...1664 Program Slots...1792 Combination Slots ------------------


But otherwise I agree, we need a librarian software for the JP-80!

Dany wrote:

JP-80 Memory:....2048 Tone Slots.......2560 LiveSet Slots........257 Registration Slots
OASYS Memory:...1664 Program Slots...1792 Combination Slots

I'm not sure that this comparison tells the whole story. If I undestand correctly you can only fully edit JP-80 synth tones in the Tone Slots and you have to use a Live Set to make limited adjustments to an accoustic tone. So it would seem that a JP-80 Live set is somewhere between a Korg Program and Combi. So for a full equivilent of a Korg Combi you have to use a registration and you only have 257 of those.

So for a full equivilent of a Korg Combi you have to use a registration and you only have 257 of those.

That's correct. 256 regs but who's counting. Like you pointed out, the difference is a live set is also a form of combi. Those can be changed within the registration. Tones, splits/layers, FX & mono/poly settings all contained within the live set can be effected without changing the rest of the registration. Depending on how you work, this can be a very powerful feature.

Bald Eagle wrote:

If I undestand correctly you can only fully edit JP-80 synth tones in the Tone Slots...

Yes, but to be precise: You can fully edit JP-80 Synth Tones only in the Tone slots of a LiveSet. But it's even worse with he OASYS/Kronos, which doesn't give you full program edit access in Combi and Seq mode at all. You have to be in program mode! While at the JP-80, you have to be in LiveSet Edit mode.

Bald Eagle wrote:

...and you have to use a Live Set to make limited adjustments to an accoustic tone.

Yes, just as it is the case with the SN Synth Tones. But in the Upper and Lower LiveSets, you can always drastically mangle the SN Acoustic Tones (and of course also the SN Synth Tones, although LiveSet Tone Modify mode is better suited for SN Synth Tone mangling, beside of course SN Synth Edit mode) of the Upper and Lower LiveSets in "LiveSet Layer" Edit mode, just as you can do the same thing with the Solo and Perc Part's single Tones in "Registration Perc Part" and "Reg Solo Part" Edit mode...

Bald Eagle wrote:

So it would seem that a JP-80 Live set is somewhere between a Korg Program and Combi. So for a full equivilent of a Korg Combi you have to use a registration and you only have 257 of those.

As those two concepts are finally completely different, the JP-80 LiveSets are in my view the better equivalent for OASYS/Kronos Combis.

PS: Of course, it all depends on the subjective view point and personal approach...

-

Its kind of interesting. I think this keyboard is really designed as a layering monster. You get 3 levels of layering instead of 2 on the korg. 4 Layers if you count the synth partials too. But that being said, the programming complexity of "Tones" is not comparable to Korg programs. Its something less. And complexity of Live Sets are something more than a Korg program. Very few of the JP Tones are useful and good on their own, they need to be sitting in a live set layered with other Tones. Therein lies the biggest memory and programming problem.

Tones are the thing that are most disappointing to me. The problem is that tones are just not good enough to use alone most of the time. They have to be layered into live sets. If people were just playing single tones all the time on this keyboard everyone would be selling it on craigslist and talking about what a lame keyboard this is. Fortunately there are live Sets, so you can layer 4 tones and get some fat and interesting sounds from the 2500 live set slots.

2500 slots are plenty for that purpose. But the problem is that I notice that there are many Tones which sound very similar to the next. In fact I find it incredibly tedious to step through all the tones, listening to the very slight changes of timbre. Its clearly obvious that each tone is some slight variation that is needed specifically to support a larger Live Set. From that perspective, it should just be in the Live Set to begin with rather than saved as a seperate independent "Tone". Oh its possible that some live sets can reuse some Tones or layer the same Tone 4x, for example, and save some memory that way. But I hear an awful lot of Tones in there which are basically way too similar sonically. They are building blocks really, not stand alone sound to play. In that sense, 2000 building blocks is not enough to support 2500 Live Sets.

That makes it tedious to hunt through tones also, but also it means that most likely if I am building my own Live Set (which to me is the meat and potatoes useful content), most likely I will create yet another new tone with the slight variations need to support my Live Set. 2000 tone slots are not enough by a long shot to support that. There should be more tone slots then LiveSet slots, by my reckoning. But oh my how tedious to step through them all looking for just the perfect tone. So actually what I think they should have done is put the complete Tone programability into the Live Set memory area, where it really kind of belongs, and the Live Set should be thought of as the building block, comparable to a Korg Program, but actually perhaps superior to a Korg Program in terms of fatness.

If the Tone programability was saved in the Live Set itself, then 2500 slots would be HUGE and plenty( that would actually be 2500x4 tone programming areas, so its quite a bit more memory). So I understand why they were trying to keep the Tones separated as separate entities to force us to reuse existing Tones and save memory. Makes sense, but 2000 slots is still not enough for that with the Jupiter programming model being what it is.

The subject about Combis vs Registrations are another issue. I think LiveSets are a good deal fatter than Korg Programs. That is why I think most of the time I can be quite happy with playing single Live Sets on the Jupiter and though there are some impressive sounding super stack registrations on the jupiter that are fun to tinker with, I can't see myself using many of them that way at a gig or on a recording. Maybe some of the pads. 256 registrations are actually plenty for gigging, and mainly they are interesting for setting up keyboard splits, which me personally I don't have to do that often.

The reason we want more memory for the Registrations is because there is no librarian, pure and simple. If there was a librarian out there, I think most people would be quite content with 256 registrations and should think of them more like gigging setups, then "combi" sounds, even though it is also possible to create super fat monster stacks with them.

most likely I will create yet another new tone with the slight variations need to support my Live Set

Depending on what you're trying to do, you can use live set modify to save tweaks to the tones w/o altering the original tone. Also if you're not impressed with the way tones sound, try listening with suitable MFX from a live set.

My philosophy is delete the things I'm never going to use...TB303, R&B basses, anything organ and anything resembling trance. If it breaks a registration or live set, I was probably not using it anyways. Besides it's simple enough to reload the old & restore into the custom sound set. Creative naming and use of catagories make it easy to find my custom patches.

you can do SOME things in the live set memory area, not all. Anyway that is besides the point. You're missing the point....listen to all the tones one by one. its an endless list of very similar sounding tones which were created to support large Live Sets.

Dewdman42 wrote:

Tones are the thing that are most disappointing to me. The problem is that tones are just not good enough to use alone most of the time. They have to be layered into live sets. If people were just playing single tones all the time on this keyboard everyone would be selling it on craigslist and talking about what a lame keyboard this is.

I know I'm coming at this discussion as an outsider, but I'm dubious as to how true this is.

A Tone uses an average of 2.5 Partials, and Partials are a full synthesizer voice with its own oscillators, filters, outputs, envelopes and LFOs. I approach my romplers and VAs very much from an old school analog synth basis, in which you were lucky to get three oscillators running through a dual lowpass-highpass filter with resonance. Most were two OSCs through a single lowpass filter, and my programming follows this structure fairly closely, with some variations, and I'm very happy with such "basic" patches which really don't sound all that basic. Having three complete Partials available to make a Tone is like having a super Memorymoog or a Matrix-12.

I'm frankly in disbelief that you need an average of TEN Partials in a Live Set to make a decent sounding patch. If this is true, then Roland has gone overboard making true partials in which many Partials are only contributing brief transients to the overall sound, the body created with one or two major Tones. If this is true, I'd say the answer is pretty simple: just rip out the SN synth Tones and load up the Jupiter with Synth Legend patches, and then keep going, programming your own.

And this is generally where I come from as a synthesist anyway, ignore all but a tiny handful of superlative presets, and go to town rolling my own patches for my synths. And I have no doubt that I'll get a lot of use out of just two of these Partials in a Tone. Three will be huge. Four... well, that's likely going to be my limit, and not all that many patches on the venerable D-50 used all four Partials in a patch because the sound of just two could be so big and expressive. And the Jupiters sound much better than the D-50 to me.

Looking forward to joining in the mangling someday soon. ;D

Dewdman42 wrote:

Its kind of interesting. I think this keyboard is really designed as a layering monster. You get 3 levels of layering instead of 2 on the korg. 4 Layers if you count the synth partials too. But that being said, the programming complexity of "Tones" is not comparable to Korg programs.

What JP-80 layers are you referring to? Excuse my ignorance as I don't own a JP-80 (yet). But I am quite familiar with the Korg architecture which you can get 16 layers in combi mode.

I think one problem I am having is that I'm trying to match up JP-80 terms to Korg's architecture and it seems that although there may be some similarities they are really very different. The past few posts have been helpful in better understanding the purpose of tones vs live sets vs registrations.

synthguy99 wrote:

I'm frankly in disbelief that you need an average of TEN Partials in a Live Set to make a decent sounding patch....

I think you are very right and your disbelief is well founded:

Excerpt from another thread:

Dany wrote:

...One single partial of a SN-synth tone represents almost a full Juno-6 with its capabilities. Try to create a sound ONLY with ONE PARTIAL of ONE single SN-Synth Tone! Because you have to know and experience the most basic structure or the atom of your synth, if you want to claim that you can manage the full potential of your JP80. It just blew me away, when I did this and it's incredible what you can already achieve with just one single JP80 SN-Synth Tone Partial! Roland somehow added a certain kind of magic to the JP-80 and the sound is already incredibly rich and expressive on this basic ground level or atomic level of one single Partial......