Audiothing is back with another great plugin, JUNE replicates the iconic Juno-60, one of Roland’s best selling hardware synths to date. You’ve probably heard it in songs across a wealth of genres more often than you think, and now you can have it right in your DAW, or even standalone or on an iPad.
The sound of the 80s is the sound of today
I remember some of the music from the 80s that the Juno-60 had its liftoff with, it was almost impossible to avoid on the radio. I liked the sound of it, even though pop bands like Eurythmics, Tears For Fears and Depeche Mode or The Cure were never my cup of tea – I was too busy listening to the likes of The Beastie Boys, Jean Michel Jarre, Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk. I think at that time, me being a teenager, all those important words and emotions that have always soaked pop music – like love and stuff – were just so tacky to me. I was going for sound, beats with attitude and energy, musical escape – not to witness somebody’s personal dramas and dilemmas spelled out.
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But here we are, I’ve been playing around with JUNE in Ableton for a while now. And even though there are other Juno-esque plugins out there, I think what Audiothing have released is a great interpretation of the Juno-60 and a plugin that’s both snappy and easy to use. And I’m glad it was the 60, it’s the dirtiest at analog between the 60 and the 106. With JUNE I can do thin and straight pads, dirtied up tones, huge LFO wobbles or bends and some really fuzzy bass, thanks to that mean sub bass oscillator and noise slider. And the filter is just amazing. I find myself assigning it for automation almost every time, it sounds like a real instrument.
Check out the video a bit further down in this article for a full track demo with JUNE on bass and keys!
That playful interface!
At the core, JUNE comes with a select handful of patches, well over 150+ in version 1.1 compared to 94 in the release version, each demonstrating the variety of the synth in the typical categories bass, FX, drums, sequences, keys, pads etc. This contrasts the trend among some of the big industry synths where you get a tool bloated with hundreds and hundreds of too similar sounding patches, hard to tell apart. The patches in JUNE are the essence of what JUNO-60 was, is and can be, and with this I’m pretty satisfied, even though I did find it so much fun to play with, that I had saved 5 new patches of my own within the course of the first few hours as well. Luckily those can be saved straight to a user folder in the patch drop down list.
VIDEO: JUNE melodics in a full track in Ableton Live
In the video below I’ve been working on a track using a couple of instances of JUNE for both the melodic parts and the bass line. As you can hear along the way, JUNE is a fun instrument for both lead and bass, even though my example may not sound like anything that came out around the mid 1980s. Surely you can make sounds and music from back then, you could probably recreate any old song or 80s vibe with amazing exactness. But JUNE is here now, ready for anything you throw at it. If you end up demoing it, check out the FX and percussive patches as well, there are some great ones in there to spark both memories and imagination.
In summary, JUNE is a great emulation of the JUNO-60. It builds on the same qualities as everything else Audiothing has released, at the core being very simple to use and very nice sounding. You can shape it and take it to extremes on the fly without any artifacts or pops and crackles (the couple of clicks in the video is the result of my laptop struggling a bit playing back Ableton and screen recording at the same time, my apologies).
JUNE is a great emulation of the JUNO-60 […] at the core being very simple to use and very nice sounding.
Anything can be assigned for automation as well, and I urge you to get the sliders and knobs going, you will feel like molding clay when JUNE heats up. It also sits in your projects at 0 ms latency. Add to this the flexible FX module section with minified versions of Audiothing’s fx plugins, and extra options for Voice Control (polyphony, unison and the FAT knob) and Chorus (rate, noise and the j60/j6 switch for chorus type, the j6 being more clean), and you’ll probably not be looking elsewhere for an 80s synth emulation for a while.
Audiothing do provide a demo of JUNE for Mac, Windows and even Linux, at their site as well, if you’re keen on trying it out. And maybe they still have the launch discount going, if you’re early reading this review.
