JUP-8V and JP-08 Sound Collections

Faithful recreations of synth-pop classic patches for your Jupiter 8 clone!

I’m lazy. Mr Bacon, my headmaster at primary school told me as much, aged 10. He called me into my classroom during afternoon break because my class teacher felt I needed a jolly good talking to because I had a really untidy desk. Mr Bacon raised his voice and slammed the desk lid down to emphasise his ranting. And it was indeed ranting. The sort that scares a 10 year old kid and, if I’m honest, has stuck with me ever since. I think it could be the source of my imposter syndrome that I frequently feel.

Anyway, in recent years, I tell myself that I’m not actually lazy, but disinclined to do things in a long and drawn out way. I’m always looking for an easier way to do stuff. And that applies to my synth programming too. I am not in any way ashamed to say I’m a preset whore. Sure, I might tweak them to taste, but I’m all for someone else doing all the leg work and then using that to satisfy my musical desires.

So when I happened across a set of patches for the Roland Boutique JP-08, a review of which did last year, my interest was piqued, especially as these patches, sold by The Electronic Music Shop, claimed to be faithful recreations of ALL the patches used on three classic English synth-pop albums, namely ‘Speak & Spell‘ and ‘A Broken Frame‘ by Depeche Mode, ‘Upstairs at Eric’s‘ by Yazoo and ‘Dare‘ by The Human League. As I was reviewing the JP-08, I thought these would really help me decide whether it was any good. So I bought a set and by golly, they did indeed fit the bill. Despite my reservations about the module, these patches really brought it to life. Sadly, as the unit was mono-timbral, I couldn’t fully recreate each song without painstakingly recording each track to audio.

I then got to thinking if they might work on Arturia’s JUP-8V plugin, the French company’s software recreation of the Jupiter 8. Sadly, the formats were, unsurprisingly, incompatible, so I reached out to the team behind these patches and was delighted to hear that they were indeed working on JUP-8V versions.

A few months later, the first conversions begun to appear and I snapped them up. And sure enough, they were as good, if not better than the original JP-08 versions. Now, I hear what you’re saying. The Jupiter 8 was not used exclusively, if at all, on these albums and you’d be dead right. But what they have done is demonstrate that with some judicious programming and proper skills, these instruments can be made to sound like whatever those bands used in the first place. There is one exception where one particular sound on ‘A Broken Frame’ is a PPG Wave that couldn’t be replicated, so they have included that track as audio (created, so I am told, using the Waldorf PPG Wave 3 plugin), should you wish to recreate the entire song as authentically as possible.

And when it comes to recreating these songs, you have everything you need in each package. Each library comes with all the patches plus MIDI files and an audio drum track. Pop the MIDI file and drum track into your DAW, make sure the timing is set correctly and then insert as many instances as are required of the JUP-8V to line up with the required number of MIDI tracks. Hit play and you will have, I shit you not, a perfect instrumental of every song off those albums! Don’t believe me? Here are four YouTube playlists containing all the songs…

Stunned? You flippin’ well ought to be! The level and attention to detail shown in not only the patch programming but the MIDI files is nothing short of stunning. I really don’t need to say anything about these because the demos speak for themselves entirely. If you have the JUP-8V or JP-08 and like early English synth-pop, you need these. Maybe you want some of the sounds, or you’re in an 80s cover band or maybe you just want to study how these songs were composed. Either way, you will have hours of fun with these.

Each pack sells for £19.99 or you can pick up all four for £64.99.

And at the time of writing, they have just announced a new pack featuring classic Duran Duran patches from their album, ‘Rio’, for both the JUP-8V and the JP-08, and as you’d expect, they sound amazing…