The management of the Japanese company has been sticking to the rule of “leaving analog in the past” for a long time. But it’s the market which rules and that’s why we did get JD-XA and JD-Xi from Roland, and now SE-02 analog monophonic synthesizer module created together with the eminent Studio Electronics company is getting its way through. Roland emphasized that this is only the beginning of a new series called Roland Boutique Designer. Read more about the Roland’s fight back to Mr. Dave Smith&Pioneer DJ Toraiz AS-1 and eventually Behringer D rackmount synth module.

Scott Tibbs, who became a Roland’s sound designer in the 90s, had an up close and personal acquaintance with each and every synth made by the Japanese corporation while consulting the developers. This video features Scott talking about the widest range of possibilities provided by the new AIRA series virtual analog synthesizer – System-8 which besides its own sound set allows “plugging” settings and presets perfectly emulating such iconic synthesizers by Roland released in the 70s-80s as Juno-106, Jupiter-8, SH-2, SH-101, Promars.

Roland launched its second brand new masterpiece too soon after the first one. Having announced two state of the art synths in roughly a year Roland leaves us a bit puzzled. The thing is that System-8 and JD-XA now have to compete against each other on the market though they’ve got practically nothing in common.

Analog generator waveform is far from being perfect – it’s unstable and suffers from inevitable voltage-brought deformation. Many of the analog filters are unsteady – you might hear some noises, phase shift or self-oscillation. But these very drawbacks make the signal so brisk, lively – well, actually, alive indeed. Digital developments helped to tame analog sound, cut it into samples, increase polyphony, give you a synthesizer equipped with the functions which were simply unobtainable in analog instruments. In 1990s instrument manufacturing companies got highly interested in analog modeling technologies development – they were eager to re-create those smallest details of electric musical instrument circuit behavior.

“The Future. Redefined.” online-festival brought to us interesting new products made by Roland Corporation, as we expected. Roland System-8 for sure seems the most attractive one to keyboardists – it’s a synthesizer with uploadable libraries and based on the same architecture as that System-1 featured though it offers a full-sized keyboard, much more control elements on the front panel surface and the main peculiarity – it’s already equipped with Roland Jupiter-8 and Roland Juno-106 models emulation.