EIGHTYEIGHT SYNTH

EIGHT VINTAGE VOICE CARDS

We meticulously modeled the eight vintage voice cards of an old unit, capturing their nonlinearities, detuning, drift and wobble — right down to the DAC scan noise. Each card's filter section carries its own subtle coloration, so no two voices sound exactly alike, just like the real hardware. A VINTAGE slider lets you dial it all in over the idealistically serviced and tuned Jupiter-8 you'd get fresh from the factory — from pristine and pinpoint to characterful, drifting and alive.

ANALOG OSCILLATORS

Bi-timbral polyphonic synthesizer with two oscillators per voice. Unlike the original, both VCO-1 and VCO-2 offer the full set of waveforms — sine, saw, pulse, square and noise — an improvement over the Jupiter-8. Cross-modulation and oscillator sync are modeled straight from the hardware, the heart of its fat, animated sound.

ASSIGNER MODES

The full Jupiter-8 voice assigner is modeled. Four ASSIGN modes decide how the voices are handed out: SOLO collapses the section to a single voice with last-note priority and legato re-pitching for tight monophonic leads and trills; UNISON stacks all available voices onto the notes you play and spreads them across the keys as you add more, for a huge, level-compensated sound; POLY 1 is the normal polyphonic mode where every key gets its own voice with full release and first-note priority; and POLY 2 gives superseded notes an instant release — like a piano damper — keeping long-release patches from turning muddy.

On top of that, three KEY modes set up the keyboard itself: WHOLE plays a single patch across the keyboard; DUAL layers two patches across the entire keyboard as two independent synth engines; and SPLIT divides the keyboard into a lower and upper section, each with its own patch — exactly as the original Jupiter-8 does. We doubled the polyphony to 16 voices per layer, still drawn from the eight modeled voice cards.

FILTER

An accurate model of the Roland IR3109 filter chip at the heart of the Jupiter-8, with resonance and a switchable slope of −24 dB/oct (four-pole) or −12 dB/oct (two-pole), plus a separate non-resonant high-pass filter to thin out the low end. Cutoff can be driven by an envelope, the LFO and keyboard follow. Capable of everything from glassy pads and woody basses to screaming resonant leads.

ENVELOPES

Two ADSR envelopes, with their timings and curves measured from the hardware so the attack snap and release tail behave like the original. Both are freely assignable: Envelope-1 can shape the pulse width or pitch of either VCO and the filter cutoff, while Envelope-2 can drive the filter cutoff and the amplifier — from tight percussive plucks to slowly evolving pads.

PLAYABILITY

Full performance control: velocity response routable to VCA and VCF, key tracking, glide, and aftertouch — the last two of which the original Jupiter-8's keyboard never offered.

LFO

Two independent LFOs, one for the upper and one for the lower section, with sine, saw, square, triangle and random waveforms for pitch, filter and pulse-width modulation. The triangle wave is our addition to the original Jupiter-8 set.

SYNC & MOD

The classic Jupiter sync and cross-modulation capabilities are fully modeled for that signature growl sound. With CROSS MOD, the output of VCO-2 modulates the pitch of VCO-1 — in the audio range this produces ring-modulation-style metallic and clangorous tones, while at low frequencies it turns into LFO-style movement. SYNC locks VCO-2 to the pitch of VCO-1; sweeping VCO-2 sharp of VCO-1 (with the LFO or envelope) generates the harmonically rich, tearing sounds the Jupiter is famous for. Push both together and you get that aggressive, animated growl.

ARPEGGIATOR

The classic Jupiter arpeggiator (up / down / up-down / random) and key hold are not yet implemented — coming in a future update over the next days.

EFFECTS

The Jupiter-8 never had a chorus — so we added the Juno-6 chorus from EightySix, measured from the real hardware, for the lush, shimmering sounds you always wished a Jupiter-8 could make, including that wonderful BBD noise floor (adjustable) that sounds like a walk along the shore. EightyEight also features the Strymon BigSly inspired DarkStar Reverb and Tape Delay engine and the HeatBurn Drive/Distortion to bring your sound to the next level.