Roland 6, 60, Boutique 06 - Arpeggiator

The Roland Juno 60 has a highly acclaimed arpeggiator.

I was listening to a friend's Juno 60 the other day and he turned on that arp.

Those melodies floated in the studio. They just went on and on.

 

The Juno 60's arpeggiator also has a clock input which was designed for a feed from a drum machine or sequencer. By using the clock-in, you can play with different arpeggio styles and adjust the tempo.

 

It's actually a 1/4" input, using a 1 pulse per note system, instead of the 24ppqn DIN Sync standard.

 

Other Roland synths with clock inputs for arps (that I know of) include:

Juno 06, 60
Jupiter 4
Jupiter 6
Jupiter 8 (both pulse trigger input and DIN Sync24 input)

Korg also produce quite a few synths with arpeggiators.

Eg the Minilogue, Wavestate, Monopoly, Poly-61

 Getting back to the Junos

The Juno 6 came out in 1982.

 A six voice, analog, manual controlled synth. It had the lushest, most beautiful, pads.

A five octave keyboard

 There is no MIDI.

This is a pic of its arp.

The arpeggiator of the Juno will sync to a clock signal (+5v) , it does not have an internal sequencer like the sh-101.

 

This is the rear.

Just plug in the rimshot of your TR 808 or the Tom of the 606, etc
 

I sadly don't have a juno 06 or 60. I opted for a Juno 106 back in the day

since it had midi. 

I do wish it had an arp.

 

So I recently purchased a Boutique JU-06

It's small & portable,  sounds great and is a welcome addition to my arsenal. It will be handy esp for live gigs.

The only regret I have is the arpeggator can't be clocked with a external trigger or via midi. The Arp seems to be driven by its own separate internal clock

I tried everything last night.... different drum machines, with triggers, midi, din etc etc.

Nothing would lock onto the arp.

The sequencer was easily synced to incoming clock, so I'm sure the arp

could be synced too. 

I'm hoping Roland's engineers will one day fix this issue with a firmware update.

 

Anyway, the solution was to bypass the JU-06 's arp completely and just use the Arturia keystep. It's arp does the job ok.

I've synced the 606 drum via a midi/din converter directly to the keystep's midi out

...

 One final prob you may encounter is everytime you start the arp, the ju-06a's sequencer will begin playing. The best way around this problem is to erase one of the patterns and use this when playing remotely.

I erased pattern 16, so when I send midi clock to the synth, it doesn't start playing the sequencer on top of the arpeggio.