equipment - detail
Roland MKS-70 + PG-800
This is new to the studio. It hasn't been used on any of my tracks yet but will be in the future. I've always fancied one of these since hearing a load of samples taken from one ages ago. The presets do not do this thing justice! With a bit of tweaking it can sound massive or downright nasty, especially when you turn on Unison on both Tones, a bit of detune and you can produce truly outstanding synth sounds. The 12-voices allow you to stack up the oscillators and still remain playable.
It is basically the module version of the JX-10 (but with better MIDI), which is the equivalent of 2 JX-8P's in a box. The two synths can be layered in a whole manner of different ways, but I think it sounds best when you have them playing at the same time.
I think it was Roland's last analogue synth in the '80's and it is excellent, it can produce some incredible synth brass sounds as well as big strings and leads. The oscillator sync and cross-mod modes allow you to produce some very 'digital' sounds with it too, such as bell type sounds and electric pianos.
I've fitted the latest ROM chip inside mine so that it can be fully edited using SoundDiver. One thing that was a nice find when I started messing with it was that the PG-800 programmer could send out SysEx data. This means that edits can be recorded and played back from a sequencer.