Roland JX-8P and Aion Modular 904A Filter

Two new items have arrived recently.

First the Roland Jx-8p. I’d played this synth a few times and didn’t like it much so when a friend offered one for sale I wasn’t interested. But then I played a jx-10 and realized how great the sounds were and decided I better grab it after all!

It wasn’t working at the time but I was pretty sure I knew what the problem was. I’d had several power supply issues with synths and computers and I felt this would be a fairly easy fix. Sure enough, when I opened it up I found some charring on the rectifier leads and some strange leakage around the capacitors.

A bit of soldering later and it came back to life and sounds fantastic. The pitch bend amount is not working however, it does work on the 2 and 7 steps settings and really, those are the only two I ever use anyway! The P12 membrane button did not work at all either but each time I played the instrument I hit the button several dozen times and now it seems to be working perfectly.

Other than that the only problem is the pressure sensitivity. Apparently it’s a common problem and if I give the pressure strip a good cleaning it should work fine again. Once that’s done I will try some things on my D-50 to fix it’s lack of pressure sensitivity as well.

So for now it has pushed the Yamaha CS-15 off it’s stand until I can rearrange things and figure out how to get more keyboards set up at the same time in this tiny room!

And the most recent arrival is the Aion Modular 904A filter.

This is a very nice recreation of the Moog modular filter, which is different form the Minimoog filter. I spent a couple of hours playing with it after I got it installed and I think this thing is FANTASTIC! I think it will be my main and favorite filter from now on. Very smooth and rich. Slow sweeps reveal amazing harmonics when the resonance is set at about 80%.

I will say that when you play higher notes with the filter mostly to fully open you get some odd aliasing type sounds that are pretty loud and annoying so it may not be good for high notes, but if that is the downside to having the filter sound so good the rest of the time I’ll take it.

EDIT: I just figured it out. I was sending a bit too much level to the module When you overdrive it a little bit you get that weird aliasing on the high notes. I found the same thing on other filters, although they seem to be able to handle a slightly hotter signal before that happens. So that’s fine, and it sounds great!

I moved the Intellijel Triatt to be right beside it since, like the original, it lacks attenuators for the CV inputs. I HIGHLY recommend this module!

My modular synthesizer has almost everything I want at this point. I hope to get the new Roland System 500 filter, and maybe the oscillators as well. I will probably want to get the Aion 921 Oscillator to go with this filter. There’s a chance I may decide to get the new Moog Mother32 but right now it’s not really very high on my list. We shall see!