The new Boutique synth switches to Roland’s ABM engine for up to 32 voices, and it’s the first in the series to ship with a keyboard in the box.
Forty-five years after the Jupiter-8 first appeared in 1981, Roland has brought it back to the Boutique range as the JUPITER-08. It takes the place of the JP-08, one of the series’ first releases from 2015, which has since been discontinued. The new model gets a redesigned panel, a different sound engine and a lot more voices.
The original Jupiter-8 was Roland’s flagship synth for the first half of the 1980s. It ran eight voices with two oscillators each, and Roland built only around 3,300 of them between 1981 and 1985. With a dedicated control for every parameter, it ended up on a long list of records from the decade: Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”, Journey’s “Separate Ways”, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” and Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Love, along with albums from Michael Jackson, Queen and Pet Shop Boys. Clean originals still sell for well above the price of most new synths.
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Most of the change is in how it makes sound. The JP-08 used Roland’s ACB modelling, while the JUPITER-08 moves to Analogue Behaviour Modelling (ABM), the same technology behind the Jupiter-X and Fantom-EX. Roland chose ABM because it can run far more voices, which was the most common thing owners of the old model asked for. The synth runs as two parts with eight voices each, and an advanced mode raises that to 16 per part for 32 in total. Roland has also reworked voice allocation and pitch behaviour to bring it closer to the original.
Each part follows the original Jupiter-8 layout. It has two oscillators with cross-mod, sync and PWM, a resonant low-pass filter switchable between 12 and 24dB slopes, and a non-resonant high-pass filter. Filter and amp envelopes and a single LFO round it out. The front panel borrows heavily from the original’s look, with sliders and knobs for every parameter instead of menus.
On top of the engine, there’s a multi-effects section with 17 types, from chorus and phaser to bit crusher and pitch shifter. It also has its own delay and a reverb with five types, one of them a shimmer mode. Each part has a 64-step polyphonic sequencer with up to eight notes per step and motion recording, alongside an arpeggiator and hold function. There’s room for 240 patches and 96 patterns.
The JUPITER-08 is also the first Boutique synth to come with a keyboard: a K-25m dock with 25 mini keys. With a built-in speaker and four AA batteries (good for around six hours) or USB-C bus power, it doesn’t need anything else to play. When it’s plugged into a setup, USB-C carries audio and MIDI, joined by 5-pin MIDI in and out, a clock input and 3.5mm jacks for the stereo output, headphones and mix-in.
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