Roland JX-3P
The Roland JX-3P was the first Roland synth ever to feature MIDI. It has the same filter as the Juno-60 and Jupiter 8, but sounds very different. The JX-3P is a great synth, that’s fairly cheap on the seconhand marked. It has a classic Roland sound.
The JX-3P doesn’t sound quite as good as the Juno-60 to my ears. Even with it’s two oscillators vs. the single oscillator on the Juno-60. The JX-3P has a slightly more canned sound, where the Juno is a bit warmer sounding.
Despite sharing the JX-P name the JX-3P and JX-8P are really not comparable. The JX-8P is a different beast all together, with a different filter and much more complex synth architecture. It has a very different sound. I’m not sure which I think is better, but they do complement eachother nicely, as they both have their own strengths and weaknesses. The JX-8P excels at pads, and the JX-3P excels at anything but that.
A drawback of the JX-3P is that the pulse wave is fixed. The JX-3P has a simple but very useful polyphonic sequencer which is very fun to use. Unfortunately the speed can’t be controlled over MIDI. In fact the MIDI specks on the JX-3P are very simple. It’s basically just on/off.
Programming the JX-3P can be tedious and unintuitive with the onboard mapping of parameters – one at the time, but it’s still very straight forward if you understand basic subtractive synthesis. However real time tweaking isn’t possible unless you have the additional programmer, the PG-200 or some kind of upgrade installed. With the PG-200 programming it is a breeze.
Audio demo samples:
All demos are multitracks of the JX-3P. All sounds except drums are from the JX-3P.