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Story

The first Jupiter synth. It was among one of the first poly synthesizers (4 individual voices which could be synced together for one fat monophonic lead), it had a pitch wheel that could be assigned to the VCA, VCF, VCO or all together, there are 8 memory locations and a cool arpeggiator - the arpeggiator can be heard in the Duran Duran classic, "Rio". It also has a very slow LFO for those ever-so-long filter sweeps. Pretty good for 1978!

Not so cool however, are the 10 preset sounds which sound nothing like the piano, brass or strings they claim to be. The placement of all the preset buttons below the keyboard can be inconvenient, especially while playing it. And as with most old analog synths, the Jupiter-4's tuning can go out often. Still it is a nice analog synth for creating weird trippy analog sounds. It's used by Meat Beat Manifesto, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, Saint Etienne, the Cars, BT, Simple Minds, Moog Cookbook, Vangelis, The Human League, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Heaven 17, and film-maker Satyajit Ray.

Specifications

Polyphony: 4 voices

Oscillators: 1 VCO per voice (triangle, square, square with PWM) and a switchable on\off sub osc 

LFO: 1 LFO (sine, square, ramp up and ramp down)

Filter: HP filter, LP rez filter

VCA: 2 env (ADSR) one for the filter which you can invert, one for the VCA

Effects: Ensemble/Chorus

Arpeg/Seq: Arpeggiator

Keyboard: 49 keys

Memory: None

Control: TRIG IN to control the arpeggiator

Manual

Download Manual