Anyone using a Jupiter 50 and vent combination?

[Electro Fan]

Hi,

 

I have watched a number of youtube videos and listened to online samples, but I am still not clear as to the quality of the organ emulation possibilities of the Roland Jupiter 50. I have not been impressed with what I have heard, but wonder if this is due to the weak internal leslie sim? Would the basic B3 organ sound with a vent make for a convincing B3 emulation? Also, did Roland provide an update to the Jupiter 50 to add C/V?

 

I have no way to demo this board, but the fact that it is a 76 key model with decent pianos, eps and string/pad sounds and is light weight, makes it a strong choice for a do it all gig board.

 

Thanks,

 

Bill

[AnotherScott]

The stock organ presets are pretty lame. The updated 2.0 Jupiter software allowed effects to be cascaded, so you should be able to do much more in terms of combining effects, i.e. CV/rotary/overdrive, but I think the stock presets were created pre-2.0 so that they don't take advantage of that. One nice thing is that the Jupiter does have assignable outs, so it should be pretty straightforward to run its organ patches through a Vent independently of anything else. I had to quickly toss together a Jupiter-based rig, and my quick-and-dirty solution to getting good organ out of it was to connect it to my iPad and create a Roland Registration that called up the GarageBand organ. I do intend to play around more with its internal possibilities one of these days. Maybe some other people who've already gone down that path will chime in...

[allan_evett]

..... One nice thing is that the Jupiter does have assignable outs, so it should be pretty straightforward to run its organ patches through a Vent independently of anything else. I had to quickly toss together a Jupiter-based rig, and my quick-and-dirty solution to getting good organ out of it was to connect it to my iPad and create a Roland Registration that called up the GarageBand organ. I do intend to play around more with its internal possibilities one of these days. Maybe some other people who've already gone down that path will chime in...

 

Unfortunately the Sub Outs are assignable only as a System setting. So you'd have to assign all Live Sets to the Sub Outs for the course of a gig. I suppose if a modified, stereo-input Ventilator was in use, and the player bypassed the unit when using other Live Sets, the idea could 'work'; but the Sub Outs also are not controlled by the JP-50's main volume knob.... So the whole Sub Out solution is not much of one, IMO - unless the player wanted to control the Live Set volume from the Vent; a slightly messy idea, especially if a Registration uses more than just a Live Set. Definite room for improvement in future JP releases. Ideally an OS update for the JP-50 - allowing for greater Sub Out routing flexibility - will happen.

 

To my ears the JP-50 organ section - while based on the VK engine, and being quite programmable - still has some limitations (the first being the lack of a per-Live Set [or at least per-Registration Part] routing to the Sub Out). If the particular organ Live Set I've created is the only thing going on in the Registration, then that sound will work pretty well in a mix; granted, it's not a XK-3c or C2 engine but it's certainly stronger than a basic, ROMpler organ. (It would be great though if Roland offered another iPad based, JP editor - this one covering organ parameters live, via touchscreen.) But I've found that when an organ Live Set is used as part of a split Registration, it can difficult to hear the organ as separate from the other JP sounds, in the mix. That ties back into the original point: being able to use the alternate outs for an individual part of a Registration would help greatly.

 

In the meantime I've either used the organ Live Sets as-is, or run the rig as Scott did: setting up an external Registration to control the iPad GB organ.

 

To answer the the rest of the OP's original question: Allowing for the output issue (and the resulting organ / Vent challenges), the JP-50 is still a very versatile, and powerful keyboard. Overall I like the instrument. I've gigged with it steadily for the past few months (about 20 gigs), and find that it covers a lot of sonic territory extremely well. The acoustic models are solid, and the electro-mechanical coverage is surprisingly good. Last night, several of the sounds held their ground quite well - even when used concurrently with a Stage 2; the JP's 200A tone sounded spot-on, while being played along with the Stage's B3 engine. The synth engine of the JP-50 is very strong; I've created a couple of Live Sets and Registrations based on Programs / Performance in my XV-5080 (sadly, not fit to take out any longer). The main Layer of one of the Live Sets, alone, just about sonically matched the XV Performance being duplicated.

[AnotherScott]

Unfortunately the Sub Outs are assignable only as a System setting

Oh, right. I agree, then, that using a Vent on the JP-50's tonewheel organ model is definitely not so straightforward. What I might do in the OP's situation is assign the Solo part to its own output, and use that exclusively for Organ, sending that out to the Vent. There is a huge limitation here... you can't use the JP-50's tonewheel modeling function, you're limited to the "rompler" organ patches that you can call up in the Solo part (no individual drawbar manipulation, etc.). But there are a good smattering of varied organ sounds there, and while they are pretty lame by themselves, I bet some of them would work well through a Vent, and might be enough to get you through a gig, with a stronger organ sound than you could get out of the JP-50 otherwise.

 

(BTW, the manual says you can assign the SN Tonewheel Organ to Lower, but you can't. That was probably lifted from the JP-80 manual and not corrected for the JP-50.)

[Electro Fan]

Allan and AnotherScott,

 

Thanks for your feedback. It would seem that JP-50 is not very straightforward for using a Vent in a live gigging situation. It is disappointing that the internal organ simulation is not stronger. The low weight and other sounds would make it an ideal board to use in a single board setup, but it sounds as if it would be difficult to even come close to the organ emulation in my NE2. I guess I am back to looking at getting an NS2, but at a much steeper price point.

 

If I was only playing in my prison ministry group, I would still continue to use two boards, and pair a weighted action board with a semi weighted board. However, I also play on Sunday evenings at my church which requires me to quickly tear down the existing keyboard, plug in my board (mono to direct box) and be ready to go in about five minutes. I can not bring two boards, or even one board and a module.

 

Maybe something will come out of NAMM that will meet all my needs.

 

Thanks,

Bill

Bill

[AnotherScott]

It would seem that JP-50 is not very straightforward for using a Vent in a live gigging situation.

Well, people do use the Vent on romplers with no assignable outs... it is do-able, the annoying part is that you have to hit the Bypass button on the Vent pedal every time you switch to or from an organ patch. Some people are fine with that, but I used to do something similar in an old setup and personally, I found it to be too much of a nuisance. But that's definitely a YMMV scenario.

 

Here's another possible solution: If you play mono, and only need a handful of sounds, you could create registrations where all your non-organ sounds are panned left, and your organ is panned right, and then just put the Vent on the right output. (The direct left and thru-Vent right outputs would be merged again externally, in your amp or mixer.) I think this might work, with the big limitation being that you can only quickly switch among a handful of registrations at a time.

 

I also play on Sunday evenings at my church which requires me to quickly tear down the existing keyboard, plug in my board (mono to direct box) and be ready to go in about five minutes. I can not bring two boards, or even one board and a module.

Another setup that might work: If you velcro'd an iPad to the surface of the Jupiter 50, you could load the GarageBand organ on it, and you might be able to leave cables attached such that it would be pretty much instantly ready to go, as if it were built in all along. (Maybe Roland's wireless iPad connection would even work for this?) You might be able to leave an audio cable pre-connected between the iPad's audio out and the Roland's auxiliary audio in to avoid even having to run another audio cable on site. Though in my brief experimentation along those lines, it seemed that the iPad might not naturally be a hot enough signal, so this approach may need some finessing. But the bottom line is, there may be a way to set that up so you take the Jupiter 50 out of its case "pre-configured" with an attached iPad module so that it is no more time-consuming to set up on site than the Roland itself would be, and the iPad would supply the better organ sound you're looking for.

[Leh173]

Just going to chime in and say that I find it gobsmacking that the sub out assignmentsare a system setting! Why would they do that?!? The Fantom G has sub outs all freely assignable in live sets or studio sets. In fact in studio mode on the Fantom G I even take an organ sound with Chorus as its PFX, send it into a distortion MFX then route that MFX block to a sub out and then patch that back into the Fantom G's Input and then routed that into another MFX block with Rotary! So sending a stock chorused Organ patch to a vent would be easy as pie.

 

Why they are creating great sounding instruments like the Jupiters and then doing things like subs outs being set globally is a mystery...

 

Typing on iPads. It sucks.

[AnotherScott]

Just going to chime in and say that I find it gobsmacking that the sub out assignmentsare a system setting! Why would they do that?!?

...

Why they are creating great sounding instruments like the Jupiters and then doing things like subs outs being set globally is a mystery...

Along the same lines, one of the cool things about the Jupiter 50 is that it has all those colored buttons that you can define to bring up whatever sounds you want. But again... the patch assignments for those buttons are global, you can't load alternate definitions as parts of registrations (beyond the actual sounds that are engaged by switching to the registration).

[Leh173]

Perhaps their design philosophy for the Jupiter series is a little too rigid? I get the impression that the Jupiters are Rolands attempt to create easy instantly payable boards without the complexity of previous systems, but have gone too far here and there or just left off options that would be useful to people.

[allan_evett]

Perhaps their design philosophy for the Jupiter series is a little too rigid? I get the impression that the Jupiters are Rolands attempt to create easy instantly payable boards without the complexity of previous systems, but have gone too far here and there or just left off options that would be useful to people.

 

Yeah.... Yamaha is guilty of that, too; as I mentioned previously, their Motif alternate output routings are pretty rigid, too. The dumb-it-down / keep-it-all-in-one-place approach gets pretty frustrating at times. Witness the second coming of the V-Combo: sure, better B3/rotary, and a couple new tricks; but what they left out - compared to the original....

Granted, we don't need our stage instruments to all be open-ended, like a giant, patch-bay synth. But, the routing scheme of many hardware instruments is too focused and fixed in place. Kurzweil likely gets the award for the most open, signal routing capabilities (I can actually save alternate outs at the Program level). The Nord Stage is great in that way too; though the fixed splits and fixed (?!) pitch-bend leaves me baffled; this.is.2013; right ? A Stage 2 'module/tabletop' looks much better, at the moment. One of those days....

 

When I moved out to CO almost five years ago, my two main hardware keyboards were Yamaha and Kurzweil; with specialized sounds provided by Roland and Nord (Electro 2 Rack for organ). Some days.... When does 'horse trading' turn into 'tail chasing', or rather - the tail

wagging the dog ?