Roland Juno-G — Workstation keyboard (£699)

The Roland Juno-G is a powerful piece of kit. If you’re looking for a workstation keyboard for under £700 there is nothing else on the market that offers 16 channels of MIDI as well as 4 tracks of audio. The newest Juno in their range has been brought up to date with the latest in digital audio technology and hundreds and hundreds of sounds not to mention how easy it is to create songs at a quality fit for release in today’s market.

As the Juno-G comes with over 1000 preset sounds, Roland have designed an easy to navigate menu system. Every sound is contained within a specific category (‘keyboard’, ‘bass’, etc) accessible via a dedicated button slap bang in the centre of the keyboard’s interface, and once a category has been selected the user can either increment or decrement by single values with the ‘inc’ and ‘dec’ buttons or use the large dial to the right of the bright orange display to scroll through them. A useful feature is that when you return to a specific category, the preset last used will be recalled. This will no doubt save a lot of messing about in a live situation. User’s can also edit and create there own sounds with one of the 256 user memory locations. As if this isn’t enough, there is an expansion slot on-board to accommodate any one of Roland’s SRX expansion boards. This effectively increases the amount of sounds available, and gives you a choice of which sort of sounds you need more of. There’s over a dozen SRX boards available today each specialising in a particular area or category of sound, e.g. ‘Ultimate Keys’ or ‘Symphonique Strings’. Each board costs around £189 and is available to order through your local dealer.

Further expression to a sound is easy with the Juno-G as it comes with 6 modulation dials (to control parameters such as envelope times and filter cut-off frequency), a pitch/mod controller, and of course Roland’s all-important DBeam controller. If you’re not familiar with the DBeam, it’s essentially a light-sensitive device that converts hand distance into a MIDI value that can be used to control a number of different parameters selectable by the user.

In sequencer mode, the Juno-G allows for tens of thousands of MIDI instructions per song, so in other words, the total length of song available is dependant on how many notes and controller messages there are within it. Things are slightly different with regards the audio part of its sequencing capability. The Juno-G comes with 4MB of audio memory preinstalled which will give you only about 46 seconds of mono CD quality; however, this is expandable to 516MB to give you over an hour and a half. On the back of the keyboard is a stereo input and microphone input with gain control so it’s possible to record from any stereo line level device (such as another keyboard or computer soundcard) or simply plug a microphone directly into the Juno-G, get a decent level, and start recording vocals or acoustic guitar. Once you’ve recorded any audio parts into your sequence, time-stretching to compensate for any slight errors as available via a click of a button, a feature useful for looping and editing to save memory space and increase continuity.

There are other effects too. A choice of dozens of different reverb patterns with the standard, variable parameters such as room size and wet/dry mix. A chorus effect with its own set of variable parameters. Perhaps the most impressive though is the mastering effects that include compression, limiting and EQ. Once you have created your masterpiece, it’s simple to burn it onto a CD. Just connect the main audio outs to a CD burner or computer soundcard, record and then burn! To top it all off the Juno-G comes with Cakewalk’s Sonar LE to get you interfacing the Juno with your computer, and a patch editor to help create your own preset sounds from the comfort of your Mac or PC. A USB cable will connect the Juno-G to your computer for MIDI transmission or to copy audio files to and from its audio memory.

This keyboard will suit the home producer with its vast array of sound and sequencing options, as well as the gigging musician with its rugged build quality, clear and easy to navigate screen and portable, lightweight design. Roland’s Juno-G is a very versatile keyboard at a very reasonable price.