Bad Gear - Roland Boutique JP-08 

Audiopilz: *slaps roof of YT channel* Full Tracks, Extended Jams, Sample Packs: www.patreon.com/audiopilz

Whilst the JP-08 is tiny, the Jupiter-X is massive and very heavy. I made a video called "vintage synth nut trys Roland's latest gear" and the thumbnail is me holding it on my shoulder. Moments later I tried lifting it over my head for a shot and the weight was too much for me and it dropped. In a split second I bent forward and caught it on my back. I was then bent over with a Jupiter on my back. I slowly crouched down in a scene reminiscent of World's Strongest Man meets Mission Impossible until I was lying flat. I then slid it off my back. I haven't told Roland that and it's their synth. In fact, they might be watching. Hi guys! Might go for the boutique next time.

I bought one and kept it in the box. Gonna give it to my future grandchild so they can trade it for food during the coming Mad Max era.

The tweezers bit is brilliant! Roland should include a set with every Boutique purchase. Also....Guinea Pig Armour!! ( Your internet search history must raise a few eyebrows. )

I had one of these and sold it as soon as the System 8 was released (and going for decent aftermarket discount). System 8 has the Jp-08 algorithm built in with 8 VOICES plus ju-06 and Jx-03 algorithm and the main system 8 engine (a total beast) and nice full size knobs and faders.

This is my favorite channel. I came for the synth reviews, have had my mind blown by the spicy jams, and I always giggle or ROFLCOPTER through the episodes. Thank you for being you and entertaining us with your talents!

Bad gear never disappoints…always the video highlight of my week!!

This episode was totally awesome. The original one liners and jokes just over flowed non-stop. I loved it. And I made it all the way through the show. I sometimes felt the speech pattern was starting to relax slightly and the host sounds better when more relaxed. Brilliant content and thanks for making and releasing it!

Oh that final track was so good. Warmed my bones up in this cold weather.

Your videos are the only reason I haven’t sold my TB-3. You always manage to squeeze so much juice outta that little machine.

Never stop making these videos!!!! They are the best!

Fantastic episode. Really loved the video for the final jam

I must say your workrate is incredible Great video as always.

I must say that there aren't any other gear review channels that I enjoy more. Thank you!!

also your jams are so well mixed and I just love this channel :)

Sir, u are a wizard with words! Always entertaining and hillarious, makes any rainy monday feel like waking up without a hangover at 04:00 in a rave!

Best way to start my weekend with the words: welcome to bad gear, the show about the world most hated audio tools😍👍🏻🙏💯

Awesomeness! Another piece of gear I own. Looking forward to this one. Thanks Florian!

Definitely a multi watch video. Great content and lots of giggles. Thank you🙂

Thank you for the entertainment!! Your videos tic all the boxes.

that vocoder shoutout was really great ! I love your vocoder shoutout ^^

I have 2 JP-08's chained together and love it!

This little beast sounds so good. Wow. Blown away.

I love your show perfect to calm down after work

I have both this and the OG and love them both. To fit that sound engine into a backpack sized battery powered package makes it a great travel synth!

Great video and music. Thank you for incorporating rip Taylor. He is a dear friend and does not get enough glitter work these days. Thanks for posting. See you next time.

Dang it man, I'm in love with the 303 line of the first jam, it's a great one! That tension build-release at the end was cheff kiss.

I love that you do this show in front of a bookshelf rather than a studio like every other gear reviewer

How can this channel only have 55k subs? Throw up a couple shorts.. love it!!!

This is how all synth reviews should be done!

How did I miss this one! It's been one of my favourites, I'm laughing on my own more than once.

loved the shout out to Dr mix! lmao. audioPilz u make the best synth videos man!

Seriously, I laughed do hard at the tweezers gag! Your show is 👌 Thanks🙏🙌🖖

I used to own the JU-06 and sound wise it was great. I even became friends with the sliders. But the lack of polyphony was what finally made me sell it

That SE7EN reference is savage. I love it! XD Keep up the good work Mr. AudioPilz.

@4:03 Florian just made a Black Metal Synth Album by accident. Now it's only a matter of time before we get to the JU-06A, Great work as always. Thanks for making such awesome music and videos!

audiopilz posted = good day

What was this show again about? ;-) JP-08 sounds actually pretty good. Entertaining yet again - thanks for sharing!

wow, that second tune what you made in the video blow my mind

I remember suggesting on this one many moons ago... you finally did it 😆

Finally Roland also made an appearance on bad gear....they're your most loyal subscribers 🤣

Oh damn, I find myself pausing every three seconds to catch all the jokes. And I still had to go back three times to finally get the "Leias" of sound reference! Thanks for keeping us on our toes.

Superb episode…. Put a smile on my face more than once. The Jupiter 8 remains an all time favorite, the sounds are impeccable….I love the Roland System-8, the Jupiter 8 sounds are on point in that machine 🎹 Salute to the magnifying glass meme 👈🏼

Really loving your videos. Your skill in many genres, the humor, the editing, it's all great. Do you have a link for your music? I'm a fan and I haven't even heard anything other than demos from this series 🤣

I have two of these thinking more voices is a must but I hardly ever use them in the polychain mode. I do like to get weird with it, it has a broad range of sounds, and even though i never owned, seen or heard a jupiter 8 in person this will bring you back to the 80's no matter what.

Sounds fantastic! Makes me want to give TAL-J-8 a shot 👀

amazing final jam!!

love all the Nick clips

Roland has managed to give the word boutique a low budget image.

I appreciate this. 4 note polyphony is not a deal maker. I do 9,11 and 13th chords.

(some of your vids are so funny I have to rewatch them) That Image of Nick Batt! Priceless!

Best editor on YT? He’s ticking all the boxes 📦

I see your MIDI controller's #2 fader had "don't remove under any circumstance" duct taping to keep it out of the fun. Cool! As for the JP-08, had one, tried to use it with my big fingers and realized my efforts were futile. The only thing I regret is selling it off so soon when they were cheap ($299US) and not just tossing it into a box so I could now sell it for double the money today. Missed opportunities... :(

Pluck your brows and play the JP at the same time? I’m in! Lol 😂

Another epic Episode and truly bad gear (I was already worrying 😉). Even if I am already diagnosed with a severe case of GAS by my wife I was never really tempted by Roland's Boutique series in general. Have a nice weekend and see you next time.

great episode! i am particularly drawn to smaller, cheaper stuff like DS-10 & pocket ops- so some of these boutiques are really tempting...

It’s a great day for bad gear!

Once I played on a original Jupiter 8 (and Juno 6) at a guy’s home studio in a rich area in Belgium. I had no idea what I was doing nor did I realise back then that the Jupiter 8 was such a big deal. I just learned a bit how to make music with Ableton, a Microkorg, and I was yet to become the synth nerd I am today. I do remember very much liking the sound. I would play a random chord on a pad patch and I was like “Weuuuuw cooool, this thing sounds so lively and rich”. So yeah, all those clichés I read about it afterwards were true. When I saw the ad for the JP-08 - which showed a real Jupter 8! - I asked the music store about it. But we both - the seller and I - realised it was a bit of a scam and were both disappointed. Would be nice if there was a new Roland Boutique version, but fully specked (or - dare I say - a Behringer Clone). Meanwhile there’s the Arturia VST version. And that’s fine.

This was one of the best intros to a Bad Gear, imo.

loving the finale songs these last few video's!

Looking forward to the Knifonium episode!

I bought all three of the original boutiques the moment they were released, and was totally underwhelmed by the the JP-08. The lack of polyphony was an unpleasant surprise, as was the stiffness of those little sliders that made tweaking sounds a bloody nightmare. Surely Roland could have upped the price a little to at least increase the polyphony by using a more powerful DSP.

The memes flick by so fast learning to pause them has actually improved my mute game!!

I love these videos 💜🎶

The visuals of the song were amazing. As an anime fan, I loved it.

The vocoder shoutouts in this episode are great, I feel. 10:12

ah, the trusty uc33. bought mine in 2002, when i laid hands on a „second hand“ copy of reason 2. still in regular use to this day. prime example of good gear 🔥

i love this finale man

Wonderful sounding synth with teensy tiny little sliders and 4 note (!) polyphony!!!!

It;s the problem with a lot of this kind of gear, combining killer sound with maddening limitations.

I was waiting for this episode! The Roland updates brought cc messages to use the sliders with a controller. I also read somewhere that someone open source hacked a midiface 4x4 to fix the note stealing issue.

When I dream of the future, I see Roland launching mini Boutique versions of the Boutique versions. Anyone else with this dystopian vision? I can't sleep anymore...

Imagine the meme potential if you crossed Nick Batt with a cat. Battcat (with PWM)!

The sliders remind me of the tiny sliders that always came on various mini boomboxes. Super easy to go too far.

Verdict : You are a brilliant artist. 🚀💥👏🏿

Came across some demos of the Korg 01R/W, maybe thats something for you to review? Not sure how expensive this one is. Another fantastic video! thank you! Its a tradition now for me to watch your Bad Gear review on friday!

I'm too old for this newschoolish VST sounding stuff and wouldn't crap out the money... Instead of pondering why it isn't called JP-04 to honor its polyphony, I admire the finale which is very beautifully done. I hope you didn't lose a finger twiddling with that ridiculous keyboard.

I think most of the Roland Boutiques sound great. I'm actually quite impressed with the Analog Circuit Behavior technology. However, the 4-note polyphony and tiny controls were a real deal breaker for me. That is why waited and eventually got a System-8. 8-note polyphony and appropriately sized knobs and sliders. Another thing to keep in mind is that daisy-chaining multiple boutiques together doesn't give you the proper polyphonic experience you'd think. The big failure is that if you have patches with long release times, they will get cut off before they finish. The design of the Boutique range only uses the next poly-chained instrument if you're holding at least four keys down. If you play a four-note chord and lift your fingers to play another four-note chord, it will not look at the envelope to see if those voices are still being used. It will see that you lifted your fingers and it won't use the second instrument. It will use the original instrument and cut off the releasing notes. Fortunately, this is not a problem for the System-8.

This is the review I've been waiting for! I love the JP-08 despite it's issues like only 4-voices of polyphony and the lack of the OG features but I can get some really great sounds out of it. I sounds VERY close in some ways to the original Jupiter 8 but listening to Sonicstate's review that compared it to the Jupiter you can hear just a bit more BOOM and THUD in the sounds coming out of the original. I'm hoping Roland will release a revised JP-08A that has all the original features, more polyphony, and maybe include a Jupiter 6 emulation in it too?

1:16 Or can we??? Dah dah daaaa!! Lol love it!

I bought, a couple of years ago, a fancy eurorack dual analogue sequencer that used the same sized faders as on the boutique Jupiter to set the step pitches. As set up, the faders controlled a frequency range of 0-10v ie 10 octaves on a 10mm fader throw. It had to go, and I'd never buy any piece of kit that uses them.

the line 6 pod (og) is pretty hated by metal guitarists but is actually pretty sick on drum machines & synths. Have i already said this? If so my bad.

The final Pokemon conclusion about the boutique series is awesome. Roland should pay a ton of money to you.

Love it all ! 🙏 11:40 - was that a clip from 'The Keep" ?

These things sound great. They have obvious drawbacks that people who don't use them love to point out because, well hating Roland is generally acceptable. The actual answer is System 8. Real keys, real knobs, 8 voices.... yummy

It's a cute little overpriced control-surface with a 4-voice Joop onboard. Totally overvalued VA. Nice review! The tweezer joke killed me, I'm dead 😂 Happy Bad Gear! Have a great weekend, Pilz!

You nailed it with "The Roland Boutique Line is line Pokemon... Gotcha Catch 'Em All!" And that's something I've managed to do so far. With any luck, they'll do a sampler next (S-10? S-50? in a Boutique), that would complete the line.

Three Nicks in one show. You're spoiling us.

Always felt weird attraction towards these rolands. Still going for Korg minilogue thou. Those teenyweeny tiny sliders is no go. Thanks for entertaining review once again!

So I'm a lucky owner of the original, since the '90s. I love it but I'll point out it had no MIDI, no CV/Gate input for pitch, and some (like mine) don't even have Roland's DCB interface. So the boutique does have more to offer as far as connections go, as well as the built-in sequencer. It probably doesn't weigh a million pounds either. 😁

i've said it and i'll say it again: i love your jams

love the unreal tournament arcane reference ☺

I knew this one was a raw deal, but geez! Everything about this one rubs me the wrong way. If you snoop around and find one with new capacitors, you could use the kind of money the JP-08 goes for and get a JP-8000 instead. It's still not a Jupiter-8 but at least it's amazing in its own way.

I will never forgive them for only having 4 voices and no rainbow buttons. Also: That IS how you pronounce Ö. Source: Am Swëdish.

Hey! This is actually good! I just want Roland to actually reissue this with a Jupiter-like aesthetic and updated sound core.

You hit the nail in the head with your final comments. I sold my JP-08 as I found myself using Jupiter-8 plugins 100% of the time instead of JP-08. The 4 voice polyphony, having to map MIDI controllers to bypass the tinytinytiny controls... not worth the hassle for me.

Although it sounds quite nice, I can't help but compare it with plugins like TAL's J-8 which feature: individual voice parameters like oscillator/filter/envelope slop, triple the polyphony of this synth, individual outputs for upper/lower layers, expanded unison behaviour, expanded possibilities for modulation, etc. The only selling point of buying a Roland VST in a box is the box itself, and seeing how small it is and how much they had to compromise to get it all in it's physical form, it ceases to be appealing.

I have 2 of these, bought new when these were available. Extra polyphony is useful especially with the dual layer sounds.

Great jams!😊👋👋✌

I bought the three first boutiques: The JP, JX and JU. Ended up selling them to get the System 8. Same engine, same sounds, better tweakability, 49 full size keys. I never looked back.