Roland Juno-Gi
Want to take just one box out on the road? Hollin Jones finds out if Roland’s Juno-Gi really can cover all the bases.
Price: £999.00
Manufacturer: Roland
Website: http://www.roland.co.uk
Roland’s Juno series of synths was reborn a couple of years ago, retaining the classic name but essentially re-emerging as a whole new product, a workstation for modern times. Since then the Juno has been re-imagined in a number of different guises, each with a different focus. Some are designed for ultimate portability, others for live performance, though all share a broadly similar look and underlying feature set. The latest of these is the Juno-Gi.
Light heavyweight
The Juno-Gi is described by Roland as a mobile synthesizer incorporating a digital recorder. This seems like an understatement: with a surprising number of features crammed into its compact frame, it’s quite possibly the most well-rounded Juno to date.
The unit itself is compact but sturdy and lightweight enough to carry around without too much trouble. It comes with a power supply, but can also run off batteries, something of a signature feature for Roland. Partner it with one of Roland’s similarly capable amplifiers and you could busk outdoors without access to mains power. The defining characteristic of the Juno-Gi is its onboard audio recording technology; this is reflected in the ports that you’ll find around the back. There’s a decent selection of I/O including stereo line in and a guitar/mic combo XLR with switchable phantom power. Each input has its own level control. There’s MIDI in/out plus control and hold pedal inputs, stereo output jacks, a headphone jack and a song/click output for sending a backing or metronome feed to a vocalist or musician who is recording into the keyboard. This thoughtful addition gets around potential monitoring problems.
A USB 2.0 port allows the streaming of both audio and MIDI data to your Mac or PC (after the installation of the relevant drivers). So, the Gi can be used as an audio and MIDI interface and you can also play any virtual instruments on your computer from its keys. It ships with a copy of Sonar LE for PC, although the LE versions of the virtual instruments also supplied – Rapture, Studio Drums and Cakewalk Sound Centre – will work on the Mac. The Gi records data to SD cards and comes supplied with a 2GB card installed in its slot and protected by a cover held in place by two screws, presumably to deter the opportunist thief. Recording full-quality audio takes up quite a lot of space: Roland states that 2GB will give you approximately 12 hours of recording time, but, of course, that’s for a single track. Use two tracks and it halves, four and it halves again and so on.
The keyboard supports cards up to 32GB in capacity, though, and since you can pick up a 32GB SDHC card for around £40 these days if you look hard enough, it shouldn’t present a huge problem. Lower-capacity cards are cheaper still and you can always bounce down tracks and transfer them to your computer for archiving or mixing to free up space as required. You can record up to two tracks at once and play back up to eight.
The Gi has a third expansion port – hidden under a flap on the front panel – for plugging in a USB memory stick and loading AIFF, WAV, mp3s or MIDI files into the Gi’s song player section.
Sounds new
As well as being a recorder, the Juno Gi is, of course, also a very capable synthesizer, with more than 1,300 sounds, many of which are new. These are grouped into categories that are accessible from the front panel and have all the performance features you would expect, including arpeggiators, the D-Beam controller, transpose and pitch/mod wheel. There’s a Live Set mode from where you can access and store sounds split and layered across the keys, complete with pattern playback. The presets are mostly very good, instantly ready for one-person playback of bass, beats and leads.
The individual sounds are, on the whole, excellent too, with the keyboards, basses, organs and synths shining through particularly well. The usual suspects – brass and acoustic guitar – are a bit lacking in authenticity, but that’s typical of most synths. There are plenty of presets, too, so you have more than enough sounds to work with. The Sound Modify section to the right enables you to quickly tweak any sound’s EQ, reverb level, cut-off and resonance, which is great for live performance. The 61-key keyboard is a little lightweight to the touch, but it’s adequate for the kind of playing you will probably be doing using these sounds.
The Gi incorporates a number of effects, many derived from the COSM models found in various Boss units, including the GT series. These can be applied to patches and to recorded tracks, either pre- or post-recording. In fact, you can even record through them while using the Gi as an audio interface to record into your DAW. And speaking of recording, in addition to recording from the audio input you can press abutton to route the keyboard’s sounds straight to the recorder section and use MIDI step sequencers to program beats internally. The recording process offers great results, although there’s a lot of button pressing involved.
The Gi provides feedback on a good-size LCD screen without too many acronyms or abbreviations. It can, however, get fairly crowded when you get into any kind of detail, be it setting up effects, toggling between channels or routing audio. It’s not really fair to compare recording here to recording with a DAW, since the whole point is that you can do it without a computer or an audio interface. But it is important to point out that it is quite a different experience, as a glance at Roland’s tutorial videos will reveal. It’s not that it’s necessarily any harder to set up and record, just that if you are used to a DAW it will be more of a learning curve.
The recording section borrows from Boss’ BR units, though, so if you have used one of those before it should be much easier to dive straight into and librarian software makes patch management somewhat easier.
Box clever
The Juno-Gi has a remarkably wide feature set, providing not just an excellent-sounding synth section with hundreds of really usable sounds, great hands-on control and battery power options, but a full digital recording and mixing setup as well. There are sufficient ports to monitor and record properly, plus support for high-capacity storage, importing audio and MIDI files and exporting audio either by bouncing down or dumping to the computer. You even get to use it as an audio/MIDI interface to boot.
Of course, what you sacrifice – and this is the case with almost every workstation on the market – is the greater usability that’s offered by a big screen and a mouse – there is simply more button-pushing and navigating to do. This isn’t a problem as such, just a factor – and something that you have to invest a little time in learning. Once you do, though, you’ll find that you can achieve rather a lot more than you might expect with this powerful and multi-talented keyboard. MTM
Score: 8/10
This review first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 93
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