Circuit modeled after the legendary Roland Jupiter-8 — the flagship polysynth behind some of the biggest records of the 80s. Dual oscillators, cross-modulation, oscillator sync and that huge, glossy analog character, right in your DAW. Coming soon.
Circuit modeled after the legendary Roland Jupiter-8 — the flagship polysynth behind some of the biggest records of the 80s. Dual oscillators, cross-modulation, oscillator sync and that huge, glossy analog character, right in your DAW. Coming soon.
My Roland JUPITER-8 emulation.
This is a beta development preview. Some features — including the arpeggiator, LFO and cross-modulation — aren't implemented yet. The beta is free, but you can support its development through the pay-what-you-want option on Gumroad. Any contribution of $10 or more earns you a lifetime license once the final release goes on sale. Note that beta versions may stop working when that release arrives.
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.
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.
The Jupiter four-pole low-pass filter with resonance, plus a dedicated high-pass filter. Modulation by envelope, LFO and keyboard tracking. Capable of everything from glassy pads to screaming resonant sweeps.
Two ADSR envelopes, matched to the original timings.
An LFO with multiple waveforms for pitch, filter and pulse-width modulation. Not yet implemented — coming in a future update.
8-voice polyphony. The classic Jupiter arpeggiator (up / down / up-down / random) and key hold are not yet implemented — coming in a future update.
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.
EightyEight also features the DarkStar Reverb and Delay engine and the HeatBurn Drive/Distortion
to bring your sound to the next level.
EightyEight is a circuit-modeled emulation built from measurements taken on a Roland Jupiter-8. The oscillators, filter and envelopes are each modeled from the corresponding hardware sections rather than approximated with generic virtual-analog building blocks. We went a step further and meticulously modeled the eight individual vintage voice cards of an old unit — their nonlinearities, detuning, drift, wobble and even the DAC scan noise — so a VINTAGE slider can take you from a freshly serviced, factory-tuned Jupiter-8 to a characterful, aged unit and anywhere in between.
Transfer functions are derived from the actual circuit topology of the original synth, focusing on the sections where component-level behavior is audible — the filter nonlinearity, the cross-mod and sync interaction, the envelope curves. Where component-level precision isn't perceptible, lookup tables and optimizations are used to keep CPU usage reasonable. The DSP is written in Faust.
The voice architecture, filter, envelopes and LFO are modeled from the hardware. The full waveform set on both oscillators is our own improvement over the original. The chorus is the Juno-6 chorus borrowed from EightySix — the Jupiter-8 never had one. The reverb and delay are original additions too: the DarkStar Reverb is a granular shimmer design inspired by the Strymon BigSky and Eventide processors with a smeared, textural character of its own, and the delay is a lofi tape delay with charming wow and flutter.
MAC
macOS Ventura (13.6) or higher
(Apple Silicon Macs supported)
64-bit only
PC
Windows 10 or 11
64-bit only
LINUX
x86_64
64-bit only
VST3 (PC/MAC/Linux), AU (Mac only)
Free beta — pay what you want on Gumroad.
The beta is free. Support development with any contribution — $10 or more grants a lifetime license once the final release is available.