Review: Roland Juno-X

Some sounds never die. Whether it’s classic rock guitarists coveting decades-old guitars and amps or Mac DeMarco messing with ’80s Casio keyboards, there’s something about vintage sounds that goes beyond nostalgia. Old guitars, synths, amps, and drums have a certain tone that we haven’t necessarily moved past. It could be the slight analog distortion, age in materials, or just the way they physically feel when we use them—there are real, non-vapid reasons why many musicians seek out specific tools from specific eras.

The problem with old keyboards like Roland’s iconic Juno-6 and Juno-60 models (with sounds responsible for a ton of the hits you love from the 1980s) is that if you want a real one, you’re going to have to pay thousands of dollars, and then you’re going to have to maintain a 40-year-old, relatively fragile piece of equipment. It’s an annoying proposition.

But if you’ve been searching for the perfect modern keyboard to scratch your vintage itch, look no further than Roland’s new Juno-X, which looks like a vintage Juno, sounds like a vintage Juno, but is easier to use (and more versatile) in the modern world.

Photograph: Roland

Originally built as a lower-cost alternative to Roland’s higher-end Jupiter-8 somewhere between 1982 and 1984, the Juno-6 (later the Juno-60 and Juno-106) is famed for its iconic chorus sound. It was used with spectacular effect on hits like “Time After Time” and “Take On Me,” among many others. After its initial stint in pop music, the Juno (as all iterations would come to be known) became a favorite of house and dance music artists in the ’90s and 2000s, who liked how it layered in between bass and high notes. These days, it’s considered one of the must-have synths for any nerd—aforementioned indie rocker Mac DeMarco loves his.

The synth is polyphonic, meaning you can play multiple notes at once—relatively expensive tech at the time it came out. The bigger Roland Jupiter-8 was the first to introduce this to Roland products and cost $5,000 on release, but the Juno-6 was meant to bring that to the masses, with an original starting price of $1,295. A part of the reason it found immediate success was that it featured digitally controlled oscillators, which meant the synth stayed in tune between gigs, something that was also rare at the time. You could plug it in and it would be in tune! 1980s magic!

Original Junos never really fell in value much. To this day, a real Juno-106 will cost you a little over $2,000 on the used market, which nearly matches inflation with its original list price and is equivalent to this new Juno-X. That’s why I’m so excited.

The Juno-X packs significantly more tech and even more sounds. You get spot-on emulations of the Juno-6, Juno-60, and Juno-106 (each had slightly different presets and tones), including three different versions of Roland’s legendary Juno chorus to mix and match with. The keyboard comes with a myriad of other excellent Roland keyboard sounds and even a built-in drum sequencer. You might be familiar with Roland’s iconic TR-808 drum machine—this has an equally excellent drum sequencer on board.

Couple that with a pair of balanced XLR outputs, MIDI input and output, and even a mic input for the included vocoder (!), and you can literally do anything you want on this piece of gorgeous ’80s design. It even has built-in speakers—a feature of a rarer, student model Juno—to play sounds without an amp, speakers, or headphones. You can even turn them on when you play live to act as a small stage monitor for your piano tones.

The build quality is impeccable, right down to familiar knobs and switches that anyone who’s used a vintage model will recognize and immediately know what to do with. In a world of “modern classics,” it really does feel like Roland entirely listened to its most devoted fans here, really trying to appeal to folks who like the old model but prefer modern convenience.

So how does it sound when compared to an original? Nearly identical. I can say that with confidence, having played dozens of gigs with a synth band and a keyboard player who rocked the original then came and visited me during my testing period. He sounded glorious on both and was able to find and save the same sounds we used on the original Juno easily. If that’s not a testament to how classic this thing feels and performs, I don’t know what is.

Photograph: Roland

But that’s not the only way to enjoy the Juno-X. I had the most productive time using it as a recording tool in my little studio, flipping through the hundreds of excellent presets Roland has built into the Juno-X until I found the perfect sound for what I was writing. As a quick and easy tool to get excellent keyboard sounds in the box, I’ve probably never found anything better. With the balanced XLR and TRS outputs, you can achieve record-quality sound instantly. The included headphone port also sounds shockingly good; I recorded out of that a few times, too.

You can plug the Juno-X into your computer and use it as a MIDI keyboard for other sounds, as well as feed it MIDI from your computer to drive things like the synth and drum machine, which is pretty rad if you have a beat in mind and want to program it in your computer first.

As an indie rock musician and fan of synth sounds, there probably isn’t a synth that I’d rather have around my studio than a Juno. It’s an extremely friendly, inviting tool that doesn’t punish your lack of analog understanding. Instead, you tend to stumble across excellent sounds without having to do much, with a bit of knob-turning to fine-tune things along the way. You don’t even need to get too into the weeds.

Roland has been making digital versions of the Juno for nearly a decade, but this version is easily the most fully functional, the real best-of finally brought together. You can get cheaper models from Roland that give you nearly the same sound, so it’s not like you're limited to this expensive model. But the fact that it works so much like the original Juno makes this my favorite. As soon as I can scrape together some cash, I’ll have to snag one of these bad boys for myself.