Best Juno 60, Roland SH101, and minimoog plugin

Just get the (free!!!) TAL Juno Chorus which is absolutely brilliant and any synth sounds like a Juno. :smiley: Honestly I use that with almost every plugin and synthesizer when I need a good chorus sound. As well as for my guitar. It is a fantastic chorus.

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Quoting myself here. Sorry. But, I have since revisited this with a bit more of an experimental mindset. I have demos of both the Model 80, I’ve tried Repro and also the Prophet V. The V sounds a little weaker than the other 2 especially in the bundled presets, although I read now that they modeled theirs on a different Prophet that had a wider cutoff filter (which explains a few things.)

With a bit of tweaking I was able to get somewhere in the region of a similar sound to the Model 80. When I first tried these, it felt like it was night and day, but that was partly my ignorance. When I tried like for like settings it didn’t work - but once I got used to how the two respond to input, it was closer and more evenly matched. There is still an underlying difference there, but it’s closer to the “I can’t tell in a mix” stage once you start messing about with them. And again, I really like Arturia’s tutorials that help you learn the synths as well - it’s a real playground.

I suppose now it becomes more about whether Arturia’s synths are a bit on the weedy side, or whether they just programme them that way in the presets.

3 years later, any new opinions on this?

or is softube still the winner for the juno 106?
if soooo which one wins in juno 60 territory? i saw audiothing has an emulation now too, called june

It comes down to taste, so it all depends, of course. About the most one can say objectively is that, if one is looking for an accurate, circuit-by-circuit emulation of the originals, then you can’t do better than Roland’s own ACB implementations. Everyone else is just mimicking the vibes and the UI.

Which is not me throwing shade. Mimicking vibes is literally all synthesizers do. It’s right there in the name. And while certain hardware accidents may have led to certain sounds, our fuzzy memory of them can often be more rose-colored that the reality. So sometimes it’s best to chase the memory, you know?

But if one wants accuracy, Roland has a lock on it. A nice thing is this ACB stuff of theirs is available everywhere. They are plugins, of course. They can be bought once or in a subscription. You can “plug them out” into compatible Roland synths like the System-8 or FantomEX. They use the same ACB code to make some of their boutiques and the Aira Compacts. So hardware/software, ITB/OTB, you’re covered.

Some down-sides: ACB is, as one can imagine, CPU hungry. And Roland’s software has never been top-quality. Bugs and UI glitches are not unusual. And like most major plugin manufacturers now, you can’t just download a plugin. You have to get their “download manager” and keep it running for copy protection reasons. Roland’s is called Roland Cloud Manager (RCM) and is fairly inoffensive these days. But even just a year or two ago gave itself a reputation for being a pain in the ass (see above re: Roland not being good at software).

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yeah i suppose you are right, but indeed the roland software is expensive (even with 50% deals) and not worth it imo because of the bad / clunky GUI and software manager etc.

If you’re Ableton Live based the Mono Mono M4L Juno and SH101 emulations are excellent. I’ve owned both, currently have shared studio access to a Juno 6, to compare. They work on Push 3 standalone too, if that’s your bag.

https://isotonikstudios.com/product/maya-by-monomono
https://isotonikstudios.com/product/mono-one-by-monomono

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Yeah those are pretty amazing. I do think Maya (the Juno) is pretty bare bones and needs a bit of work to get it to sound ‘polished’. IMO AIR’s Jura sounds a lot fuller straight of the gate but I can’t comment on its accuracy at all. Just personal preference.

My fav Minimoog is still NI Monark. Reaktor ftw :slight_smile:

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I am in Softube camp.

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Roland - Roland - UAD for me.

Most of my back to back testing was on the 101 which involved Tal, Softube and Roland. Fwiw my initial impression was that Softube had more superficial wow factor but as I pushed them the Roland plugin came in as a clear winner to my ears.

Honourable mention for the Synapse MiniMoog, very good and has 4 voice polyphony, but UAD’s analogue modelling is pretty much peeress. And it has now belatedly gotten midi learn, which was the main downside at launch.

Also a shout for MonoMono for use in Push standalone, I haven’t really tested it back to back against the Roland one but it always hits the spot when needed.

But there’s not much between any of these - I have my personal preferences but there are a lot of high quality options out there these days.

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I have AIR Jura (from my MPC) which I sometimes use standalone as you get the VST too - however I use it with the standalone Tal Chorus LX - I feel like if you already have Jura this gets you twice the (soft)synth for your money (and it really does sound better than using the Chorus in the Jura plugin).

I have considered buying TAL-U-NO-LX because the Tal stuff is bang-for-buck exceptional - but I’d have to do a good trial period because I have a feeling that using the Chorus is already giving me the extra special sauce I’d be getting anyway.

Air stuff is also quite resource efficient, on account of it being made for MPC.

I find the softube interfaces kind of odd - they are aesthetically beautiful, but a terrible use of screen real-estate - the Tal stuff is better designed for screens IMO.

I also use the Air MiniD plugin for moog stuff.

For SH-101 Tal-Bassline-101 does it for me. But the reality is that if I hadn’t already bought the Tal I probably would have bought the Air Iona, which was released too recently for me to have considered at the time.

So my recommendation is: If you own (or plan to own) an MPC, then buy the Air stuff, you can use it in your DAW or your MPC and it is plenty good enough. Otherwise TAL is probably the best choice that doesn’t break the bank. If you don’t already have their free plugins do get those too - TAL-Reverb-4 is one of my favourite and most used reverbs.

i’ve tried pretty much all of the Juno 60 emulations and to my ears the Roland Cloud sounds the closest. but like others have mentioned it uses a lot of CPU to the point where it’s unusable for me, i need low latency for live playing. the TAL comes second imo, but it’s overly bright. it lacks some of the grit of the Roland emu. i found that if i add some slight saturation and eq the highs a bit it can sound very good. just my 2c.

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Hey guys, Nik here from Monomono.

Thank you so much for the mention of Mono One. With regards to the comparison with SH-101 — I’ve recorded a direct shootout with SH-101 at the release:

The biggest change from SH-101 if I recall correctly is extended decay and release times which I thought sounded really cool for long droney sounds.

Now in hindsight the video is a bit long and convoluted, but I was trying to make sure there’re no cuts or any trickery behind. Hope it does the trick.

With regards to Juno-60 plugin, I’ve also modelled Juno-6 (which is a Juno-60 without the digital controls and a bit different chorus LFO circuit) into Maya — it’s also a M4L which also runs on Push 3 SA. I’ve been a lazy boy and haven’t recorded a proper shootout for it unfortunately. I’m working on the Maya update as I write this with a lot of Live / MPE related refactoring and once I’m done and schedule for release, I’ll record a proper shootout like the one with Mono One. At the time of the release, it sounded really close to my Juno-6. At least just as close as one Juno-6 to another Juno-6. :slight_smile:

Hope this helps. Appreciate the mention and if you have any questions, let me know.

Once I’m done with Maya update, Mono One will get the same treatment with better MIDI/MPE and I’ll implement the presets with factory patches from the SH-101 patch book. You can likely expect it somewhere in June.

Thanks,
Nik

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what about this: JUNE by Audiothing - A JUNO-60 remake celebrating the synth vibe of the 1980s - Wavepusher.com

I was thinking of picking up a Roland synth on the current PB sale, but I’ve never used Roland Cloud before. Do you mean Cloud Manager has to always be running in the background like the annoying UAD client (which you can quit but will always come back the moment you open a plugin)? Or is it just an installation hub like Arturia Software Center?

I bought it to have Clouds in my DAW. The first bummer is that the GUI is not scalable, on my 4K screen it’s tiny. And then, it’s all looks over usability (contrary to Byome, for example). Still it’s cool to have Clouds in the DAW :wink:

It’s exactly like Arturia Software Center. But that works differently than I think you think it does. If Arturia’s background process isn’t running on your computer, this is the error you get when you launch any of their plugins:

Arturia’s background app has to be running or no plugins for you. Same with UAD or Softube, or Steinberg or anything iLok — and the same with Roland Cloud. If the the Roland Cloud background process isn’t running, then you see this alert and the plugins run in demo mode:

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I was sure that Roland Cloud just needs to re-authorize every 30 days. Also, I don’t keep Arturia, UAD, or Softube agents running. I only fire them up when updating. iLok needs to be running though. It’s what hosts the licenses.

It has to be connected to the internet at least once every 30 days for it to validate subscriptions. But if the background process isn’t running, the plugins won’t run.

This can be hard to test because, in the later versions, the background process (called “Roland Cloud Manager Service”) will try to relaunch itself whenever one of the plugins is opened. This is actually a pretty nice feature as it keeps everything working even if the service crashes. But it does mean if you want to actually prevent the service from autolaunching, you essentially need to drag Roland Cloud Manager to the trash.

Same story with “ArturiaSoftwareCenterAgent”. It launches itself when you open one of their plugins whether you had it running or not. But if you drag the “Arturia Software Center” app to the trash so that its agents can’t be launched, you’ll see the error I show above (in the best case. Sometimes Arturia plugins just hang Logic while they search forever for a way to phone home).

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Interesting, I had always thought the Arturia agent that loads at startup was just for updates, not licensing as well. TIL.

So long as the process is well-behaved and uses negligible resources, though, I don’t really mind an invisible background app. What irks me is the likes of UAD’s menu bar app: it’s like, come on UAD, you’re not the only plugin developer on my machine, and if everyone had their own menu bar apps, there wouldn’t be any room left for volume and wifi!

Does Roland’s background process have a front-end that presumes it should always be in front of you like UAD, or is does it run silently in the background like Arturia?