A second synth went recently through my studio: the Roland System-1 was thought as a lightweight alternative to the Matrix Brute for smaller live gigs. The synth sounds very versatile, has cool crossmodulation features, unusual waveforms and a very nice arpeggiator. Compared to my other synths I missed character, warmth and voices. Actually it’s a monophonic synth, but it has a polyphonic mode in which it’s able to play 4 voices at the same time, but the sound becomes much thinner – somehow strange in a digital synthesizer. Maybe I would have kept it but as we say in Switzerland the better one is the enemy of the good: I sold it to get the money for a really nice, fat and even in polymode nice sounding synth: the DSI Pro 2.

I bought this synth basically to have some tweakable lightweight live padsounds for Tanga Zoo to support my Matrix Brute, which is monophonic. The Roland JX-03 is a very cool digital reincarnation of the JX-3P from the 80ies. While the original had almost no controls (without the optional – still rather expensive – controller), this small and cheap box has a knob for nearly each function, a very cool sequencer, a built-in speaker and battery compartment for tweaking on the road. The sound is cool but too conventional for my purpose and the four voices polyphony too less for a useful pad. A comparison with it’s bigger brother, the original Juno-60 in my studio, made clear how a big analog pad could sound – so the JX-03 had to go…