Roland Juno-106

It's it's pretty basic, so the amount of sound sculpting that you can do with it is limited. It does have a great layout. It's really easy and intuiti...

Then you can add, for example, some LFO here, which is okay. If you don't suffer from seasickness and also the range, if you want, you, can instead se...

The 4 voice polyphony of the minilogue was a little limiting for me. All in all I say it's a good first synth!.

When I saw a Juno 106 being sold for $53, I knew I had no time to think. I bought it immediately and got it delivered the same day. A couple faders were missing (not just the caps, the faders themselves) but overall it looked great. And anyway I would replace all the faders and the buttons (and that's $100), I have an Alpha Juno 1 so I didn't have high expectations regarding the buttons durability on an old Roland synth.

The Juno 106 has those fast crisp envelopes, but the oscillators and filters are quite "boring" and clean. The chorus has a pretty immediately recognisable sound, and in general it stands out. I often mention the Sequential Sixtrak and Akai AX73 in this kind of discussion because they use exactly the same voice chips so they should sound exactly the same, right?

It looks pretty much brand new and functions perfectly. The voice chips and battery have been replaced. All sliders, keys and internals have been cleaned. I love the sound of the 106 but I also have a Jupiter XM already…so I’m a bit torn.

Honestly, I just kinda fell in love with this synth in general. The stereo delay seems super useful as well.

I knew I’d made a mistake, not liking the sounds and build-quality, so I returned/exchanged it a day or two later for a Roland Juno-106. A few months later, I added a Yamaha DX-100 to augment the Juno with some “modern” digital sounds, and haven’t bought a brand-new synth since. I did get a Pro-One for $50 a couple years later from our bass player (not sure where he’d gotten it for cheap).

I traded in my Microkorg for it a while back and it was a marked improvement but not long after I came into a Juno 106 and it kinda fell by the wayside. Picked it back up pre-pandemic when I was doing a lot of shows and collaborating with people out of town cause it's portable and a decent MIDI controller and I'm not dragging the Juno around with me. Didn't take me long to really dig into it and find that it's dead ass easy to make some incredible sounds.

The ability to switch between a Juno 60 and juno 106 just seals the deal. I Have messed around with arturias software emulations and they're fun too, but even though they do give you more options I ultimately like the simpler 4 banks of 8 presets design. Roland really did a good job on these.