Released in 1991, the JD 800 brought the synthesizer world back to its roots with a massive control laden panel and an aggressively electronic sound palette.
And it soon became a favorite of music producers throughout the 90s and beyond.
Combining the original J-800 waveforms with advanced modeling techniques, the JD-800 software synthesizer brings the gleaming tone in monster sound, shaping potential of this vintage digital icon to your DA W.
Let's hear what it can do.
The JD-800s huge complex sound comes from its unique four layer architecture, which is mixing four separate tones together to make the sound, and each of these tones is really an individual synthesizer in its own right.
Being driven by D-50 style sampled waveforms going through resonant multimode filters.
A comprehensive effects section which can be rearranged, as well as lots of deep modulation capabilities, which are somewhat player focused with things like aftertouch and a lot of interest in settings in the LFO section that we'll take a look at shortly.
The JD-800 software synthesizer comes with all 64 presets from the original hardware, as well as 64 brand new presets that reimagined the JD in more of a modern context.
Of course, you can create your own sounds from scratch, and you'll be programing them just like you would on the original hardware.
And there are some tools to make this a little bit easier,
like utility, you can copy and paste one tone to another and you can initialize the tone, of course.
And copying and pasting is very useful because you can make one sound on Tone A copy it to Tone B and do things like shift it up an octave change the filter settings a little bit, change the waveform to give yourself a much bigger, wider kind of sound.
Let's take a listen to some of the presets.
First off, let's choose.
Deep Breath Pad.
Definitely a sound of the 90s.
Take a listen to Dynamic Pad.
Bit more of a plucky kind of sound.
And we'll check out one more.
NuAge Synth.
Now, if we use the active buttons here, we can select which tone is being displayed on the front panel and above with the layer buttons, we can turn off each tone.
So we can hear that Tone B is using a xylophone waveform.
Adding that percussive sound at the beginning. Let's turn those other tones back on.
Moving on, let's take a look at some lead sounds.
Like Wailing Guitar.
And there you could hear how some of the different layers were acting like overtones on the guitar.
Let's check out another sound.
Go to Fusion Solo.
Nice, simple and effective, filtered down solo sound.
Let's check out a bass sound.
Lazer Bass.
The JD is great at making really punchy, kind of bright bass sounds when people think of the JD-800, however, they often think of more ethereal, evolving sounds.
Let's take a look at one more Lushy.
It's a very cello-like kind of sound.
Lots of subtle movement.
All right, now, let's take a look at some of the deeper capabilities of programing on the JD-800 software synthesizer.
To do this, I've created a custom patch and this sound is going to react very differently, depending on the note length.
So let's play a couple of chords really short, staccato to start.
So that's quite a simple sine wave pluck sound.
Of course, we've got some reverb and some delay on there as well.
Now I'm going to play a little bit longer on each chord.
And you've heard that second layer is now audible because the gate length of the notes was just a little bit longer.
Here we go,
I'm going to play even longer this time and you'll hear that third layer creep in.
Let's pull apart the sound one piece at a time.
And to do that first, we want to go over to the layer section and turn off Tone B and Tone C. So we only want Tony A to be heard. ow in the active section.
We also have to make sure that the tone we want to edit is selected, so this means any changes that we make on the front panel right now will only affect Tone A if we wanted to edit B, C and or D at the same time as A, we could hold shift and select them like this.
But for now, we just want to affect Tone A.
Let's run a sequence.
So this sound is quite simple.
It's a sine wave as the main waveform.
No filter is being used, and we've got a relatively quick decay on the amp envelope.
Now, the envelopes in the JD-800 are quite special.
They're not your standard ADSR envelopes. In addition to being able to set the time between each stage,
you can also set the level of each stage, as you can see in the diagram above.
So this allows for much more kind of expressive, interesting envelopes to be created.
Also, external inputs can change how the envelopes behave.
And that's why we call these time variant envelopes.
So if we see here, we've got time key follow.
Now what this means is that we can tell the envelope to change the length of some of the time stages based on the keyboard scaling.
So if I turn this all the way down, what we'll hear is lower notes are shorter decay, higher or longer.
Put that back where it was, and we can also use velocity to control this.
All right, let's take a look at the next layer.
First off, we're going to turn on Tone B and will activate it.
Let's go ahead and turn Tone A off, so we hear just Tone B.
So whereas we didn't use a filter for Tone A, Tone B we have a high pass filter here with a bit of resonance.
And that's helping it just sit above Tone A, which is a pretty full sine wave and a bit of a lower register.
So we've got a pretty slow envelope going on on the AMP and the filter envelope, so we are adjusting the filter a little bit with that envelope.
But the most interesting part about the sound is you'll hear that when the sound releases, the pitch goes down just like that.
Now we're using the pitch envelope for this, so we're able to apply a similar type of envelope to the pitch of the waveform.
So here you can see the only section that we're using is the release, and it's going down.
So whenever the note is released off the keyboard or the MIDI sequence, the last stage of the envelope engages.
Very cool.
OK, let's look at our third and final layer.
So this is the third one that kind of creeped in when we hold the notes down much longer.
So similar to Layer B, we've got a slow attack.
Kind of sounds a bit like,
an accordion as it comes in.
But then we have this rhythmic part happening. Now, let's take a look at how we did that.
So first off, we're using a band pass filter.
So really, when we look at this whole patch, we've got the sine wave that has no filter and it's a bit lower in its frequency.
We've got the upper layer that's on Tone B with the high pass filter.
Then in the middle, we've got this rhythmic part with a band pass filter, so it's really filling out the whole spectrum nicely.
So we have a bit of a filter envelope happening.
As you can see here.
But that rhythmic aspect, now that's coming from LFO 1.
And you'll see that we have a sawtooth wave selected.
And what we've done is applied the LFO a little bit onto the filter.
Not too much, let's turn that back down, but most importantly, we have the LFO applied on the AMP, so this means that it's going to be affecting the volume of this layer.
And the way that this LFO is kind of creeping in is not actually related to the slow attack on the envelopes.
What it is is these parameters here we have LFO delay and LFO fade.
So first off, we're delaying the LFO when it's starting.
And then when it does start, it's going to fade in slowly.
Let's turn on our other layers.
And just to take a quick look.
We have delay and reverb on here, as mentioned.
And to the left of our effects section on the common MFX screen, we can also do things like set the key range, the EQ, common level and behavior for the bender and aftertouch.
When you're editing many layers at once, as we mentioned, you can select the different layers to be edited by holding shift on the active section, but also this palette section is very important where we can select any parameter on the front panel and then that parameter will be live on the palette sliders for Tone A through D, respectively.
So if I wanted to change just the cutoff, select cutoff here and now, I can change the cutoff for Tone B by itself, Tone C by itself.
Very cool.
Excellent for quick editing and hands on performance as well.
And finally, we've got the sync button engaged on the LFO. And our rate is set to dotted eighth notes.
So let's bring in some rhythmic material and we'll hear how this sits with some drums and bass.