The Roland Juno-60 is a stone-cold synth classic. Manufactured between 1982 and 1984, this six-voice polysynth was viewed as a ‘diet’ Jupiter-8, but had a charm and simplicity all its own.
There are various plugin emulations of the Juno-60 on the market - the latest, Air Music’s Jura, arrived just a couple of weeks ago - but it’s come to our attention that one of them, IK Multimedia’s J-60, is currently available for free.
This is one of IK’s Syntronik 2 instruments, but if you don’t already own that software, you can run J-60 in the free version, Syntronik 2 CS. It includes more than 800MB of content, more than 2,000 samples and 78 presets.
Although it has a trimmed-down feature set in comparison to the Jupiter-8, the Juno-60 is still known for producing enormous bass, amazing pads and spooky arpeggios. There’s also that famous chorus section, which was originally added to compensate for the lack of oscillator detuning but has now become legendary in its own right.
The J-60 is usually priced at €50, but you can currently download it from Audio Plugin Deals for free.
