Tips for Using the Roland Juno-6 Polyphonic Keyboard

Video Transcript

"My name is Dan Rapport. Today we are going to be talking about analog synthesizers. So here we have a polyphonic synthesizer and in this case it is a Roland Juno-6. It was made in the early 80s and definitely a pre-MIDI keyboard, and in this case we have six voices to work with, so unlike the Moog or the ARP, we can play chords on it. And it has many of the same features as the Moog. In this case we have a digitally controlled oscillator, it is still analog but it is not voltage controlled it is digital controlled, and we have our noise slider, we have a high frequency bypass filter, we have our frequency and resonance controls for the filter, just like the Moog and the Arp, and we have our envelope generator: attack, decay, sustain and release. With our voltage controlled amplifier we can gate it so as soon as I lift my hands off the sound stops, or we can go with the envelope modifier. I have a slightly high at release time here, you can turn the release all the way up and it sustain for quite a while. This also has a built-in chorus control and one thing that this has that the Moog nor the Arp is an arpeggiator, which allows you to get arpeggios of chords. We can control the rate of it as well as the mode, here it is an up and down, that’s all down, all up; this range switch will change it. Other than that pretty much the same controls: we have our low frequency oscillator, we have a pitch bender knob, and we have an LFO trigger as opposed to an LFO knob or modulation wheel, as on the Moog. We can also make it automatically controlled with this delay time. So this is a polyphonic synthesizer, it definitely has a different sound than the Moog or the Arp. You know, you could do what I did and get them all and then you could have any sound you want. "