Roland JX-03

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…