![]() ![]() ![]() The only real surgery involved was changing the internal battery. I can’t imagine what a full set would cost-assuming I could even find that many of them. I bought two just in case and they weren’t cheap so I’ll save them until I really need them. I had planned to change all the tact switches but apparently the JX-3P uses proprietary ones. I also doused the hold and sequencer start/stop tact switches with some of that magic elixir. I squirted a little DeOxit into the switch housing for the pitch bend range, as the low setting wasn’t engaging cleanly. Technically, there was very little wrong with it. Opening it up, it looked like maybe I was the first person inside since it left the factory in Hamamatsu. It even had the original sheet music stand. My keyboard and programmer arrived in great shape, with very little sign of wear and tear on either of them. The latter is admittedly subtle, but detune that second oscillator a bit and here come the fireworks. For me, what sets this apart from the Junos is that it has two oscillators, and so it can do some things that other Roland synths from the same time can’t, like oscillator sync and cross modulation. So you have right from the beginning a unique synthesizer. Presets because guitarists tended to not do much sound design with earlier guitar synths. Six notes of polyphony for six guitar strings. Certainly it looks like nothing else in the Roland catalog, and when you think of the sound as something that would mix well with guitar-swirly, chimey, toppy-the thinnness of it starts to make sense. The fact that the 3P came from a different R&D team than the Juno and Jupiter is reflected both in appearance and sound. ![]() It had reached a certain state of development when Roland realized it could be spun out into a keyboard synth as well, and so the PG-200 can be used with both the 3P and the GR-700. If I remember correctly, the JX-3P was actually born from the GR-700, a guitar synthesizer. Of course, having to buy two machines was good for Roland’s bottom line, but the history of the development of the JX-3P may help explain it as well. Why not save everyone the trouble and just put those controls on the front panel like a Juno-106? It’s not like it saved the consumer any money-the JX-3P was more expensive than the 106. I remember seeing pictures and thinking how odd it was that it had a separate programmer, the PG-200. It’s quite possible that I never even saw a JX-3P in person until mine arrived at my door. ![]() The relative rarity of the machine only adds to its allure. ![]()
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