MKS80

mks80

Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 synthesiser and MPG-80 programmer.

I bought this from someone in Belgium a couple of years ago via eBay.

People talk a lot of hyperbole about the MKS80 and other Jupiter synths and to begin with I was a bit underwhelmed, because it doesn't really jump out at you. But it's got a great sound, not so good for crazy effects, and pretty useless for strings, but nice for brassy chords, typical Roland blurpy sounds, pads and so on, and you can make amazingly heavy unison-mode bass sounds. It's cool for keyboard splits and layers too and has seperate outputs for the two voices so you can use it as two synths at once. It's easy to sound like Drexciya and Dopplereffekt with this synth, and not too hard to squeeze out some Mr Fingers sounds either. I think the sound is a bit "sharper" and less warm than a Jupiter 8 but it's just as worth having and takes up less space.

On the down side, the stepping on the parameters when you use the programmer is really annoying (but it's a lot better than trying to use the front panel) and the outputs are pretty noisy. The envelopes often click in a really annoying way which you can hear on a couple of the MP3s.


EXAMPLE SOUNDS

All these sounds are just MKS-80 with a little reverb and delay, no other effects. The first two have some drums as well.

MKS8001 - MKS-80 bass tweaking over TR-808 samples from the K2000.
MKS8002 - More MKS-80 tweaking over TR-808 samples from the K2000.
MKS8003 - Cross-modulation sweep.
MKS8004 - A resonant sound.
MKS8005 - Woodwind.
MKS8006 - Low stringy pad.
MKS8007 - Funky resonance.
MKS8008 - Resonant synth brass.
MKS8009 - Jam & Lewis organ.
MKS8010 - Digital sounding.
MKS8011 - Clavinet/harpsichord kinda sound.
MKS8012 - Gary Numan.
MKS8013 - Light In Darkness.
MKS8014 - Big sync sound.
MKS8015 - Weird sucking bass.
MKS8016 - Pitch envelope bass.
MKS8017 - Slow Leslie Hammond.
MKS8018 - Oscillator sync.
MKS8019 - Split keyboard patch - synth bass with filter cutoff modulated by note velocity, and chords with slow filter tweaking, TR-808 samples from the K2000.


LINKS

Sonic State MKS-80 page here
Far Too Good MKS-80 page here
Synthzone MKS-80 page here
Harmony Central reviews here
Roland manual downloads here
Vintage Synth Explorer Roland page here