Roland JUNO-Di Mobile Synthesizer - what a surprise!

RobJuno, you need a vacation... badly...

@ Rob Juno

What's wrong with the JUNO Di in your eyes?

OR what do you expect?

It's a toy. I've only ever met one person in my life who was into synths. I'm 30. That suits me. Here we see the march of dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. I don't blame Roland, it's their business. But encouraging everyone to think they can be music superstars, like all the crap 'talent' tv shows that are on continuously now, is just going to make music more bland, commercial, controllable... i.e. manufactured. We've gone through boybands and the spicegirls in the 90s and 00s - who were all just faces to someone else's work, now the crop of young real bands are actually creating catchy music, but i bet they understand less of the technology and programming/engineering process than others in the past.

I'm just surprised that anyone on this site would be remotely interested in this product, surely already owning far more professional equipment. But then I've always thought there's something very odd about the expensive-home-keyboard market... does it still exist? There used to be home keybaords up to about £2k, with a thousand multicoloured plastic buttons on the front. Odd.

Rob, with all due respect, saying "It's a toy" about something you haven't even seen - let alone heard - in person, is not going to make you sound serious. The technology moves on and things that were expensive yesterday are always affordable today and cheap tomorrow.

If you look at it, everything seems to go wrong, starting with fast food replacing relaxed meal ceremonies. Everything is going commercial, because no matter how we whine about something, we buy it and we supported. More or less, but we do. But all of that stuff has no taste. All becomes too similar, too artificial...

However, the interesting thing is that in this awful mix of all generic, really special things become more noticeable, more distinctive. The spiral will soon make another turn... you'll see.

I got to say I felt a splitted feeling when I found about the Di. First place I though: What? a 3rd Juno that is neither a Juno-G, neither a Stage but that still can be considered a downgrade of both? Then, when I found the price target I understood it: No, this is just Roland bringing the "Fantom" sound quality to the cheapest Roland synth range and the Di can in fact be a replacement for the Juno-D. So now it all makes sense for me. If we consider the begginer/cheap instruments of the market as "toys" then I guess everyone should be "running" with Fantom-G/Yamaha Motifs and Korg M3 to make music.

@V-CeeOh - I was going to say nearly the same thing.

@RobJuno - I agree(d) too. At first, I even thought to sell my Juno and get a pretty silver Fantom, because now they devaluing the Juno brand. Right?

Then I saw this cat jamming out on a Kids Musical Fun keyboard and thought, 'I want that instead!' $20 on ebay.

Bloody amazing really.

I do think the Juno-Di is a somewhat awkward replacement for the D, but the D was a bit out of place to begin with.

As far as synths go, the whole market has been bland for some time, this isn't new. Of course it is consumer driven, as the technology has thoroughly matured; some might even say to the point of stagnation. If you want innovation today you have to look at the software side.

and musicians? Who cares? We all know it takes more than a few sample kits and 1000 presets to make something worth listening to, but you make it sound like a conspiracy theory, the labels in cohorts with Roland to dumb down the next generation?

'Real' electronic artists have always been in the minority. This idea of 'professional gear' has nothing to do with that, but I suspect you realize this.

When synths came along in the 70's (yes I'm old) a lot of people said it would ruin music. It didn't. In fact it gave muso's more scope to be creative. As far as being bland and commercial, well, commercial music is bland and yes, it is a business as are the 'I wanna be a rockstar' TV shows but once in a while a real talent will come along that would probably never have been heard otherwise. Same goes for the 'entry level' (I hate that term BTW) instruments like the Di. Most kids or their parents can't afford the high end stuff and I must admit I would not be happy if I had forked out for a Fantom G8 just to discover my kids had lost interest after a couple of weeks. A Di on the other hand is more affordable and who knows, one of those kids might turn out to be the next Keith Emmerson (I hope you remember him) .Roland should be applauded for making a great musical tool more accessible.

On the musical side of things, there will always be talented people writing great stuff even if it never makes the charts. Just look at the thousands of artists on the net giving their creations away for free. These are the real musicians.

Don't despair. The Di will not be the end of life on earth as we know it. The cream will always rise to the top.

As for the little gimmicks like the song player. I use an mp3 player through the audio input on the Juno G. It has a recording of our band minus the KBD parts and it is very handy for rehearsing or working out new chops. It's not just for wanna be's.

B4D

Seems to be Roland's answer to an instrument like the Korg X50. I have a Fantom G6 which I use on stage but I have an X50 which I prefer to take to practice sessions just because it is light and portable. Am looking forward to the 'Di'.

Would it be possible to tranfer patches from the Fantom G to the Di?

mohan, the Fantom-G includes almost 4x times the waveform memory of the Di, which means, no, you can't load it's patches into the Di, it wouldn't be able to play them properly.

It's not a real synth from what I understand? Just a ROMpler? i.e. you can't tweak patch like in fantom-g... Or am I wrong?

Bratan, you're wrong. It's true that you don't have all the available parameter on the Di itself. You do have to use the Editor to get the full potential of the synth engine (that is similar to the Fantom X). But you have some parameters you can tweak right away and you also have the Sound Modify knobs on the front panel.

Yes, the editor allows you do edit patches as deeply as the bigger Fantoms allow. It's really great to know this.

@ Bratan

Yes, you can tweak the sounds, there are dedicated knobs ready for that. Yes, it is a rompler in some way, with more natural instuments saved as patches. The JUNO Di is not a SH-201.