I tried Jura so you don’t have to (MPC Juno Plugin)

does the world really need another video about akai's Juno emulation plugin does the world really need another Juno emulation plug-in I have no idea but I wanted to try it out so here we are to be very clear uh Akai has no connection with this video I bought this with my own money and just wanted to give it a go and I will admit the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek because there is a free trial so you can try it if you want all that being said let's get into it oh so this is Jura the definitely not a Juno emulation uh plug-in by Akai this is a paid expansion plug-in basically for their line of Standalone NPCs the force all that kind of stuff I got it on an introductory sale and I've dug into it just a tiny bit but I wanted to mostly try it out on camera uh it is pretty funny by the way how the sales copy for it just dances around the fact that it's a Juno emulation because they don't want to get in trouble with Roland uh when the parents are fighting it's uh it gets weird so this is the main bit of the interface you've got your kind of main performance controls and your main envelope controls that you can cycle through envelope one and envelope two your course the all-important I kind of think combining them is a bit much personally and then hopefully a mix knob and I hate how this covers it up but it'd be like that so right now I'm just tweaking the default preset and I do want to mention right off the bat as someone who owns a Roland ju-06a that I really like the sound of and really like the form factor of but rarely use that's part of the selling and anti-selling point of this thing for me because on one hand this is not as Hands-On it will never be as Hands-On even with the Q links and such it just won't be as Hands-On and it won't have that kind of oh a mini Juno isn't that adorable Factor but on the other hand having it self-contained on a device that I'm already going to be making for songs with is super nice that's what ultimately convinced me to pull the trigger plus the fomo of the early sail Landing but don't worry about it so I've already recorded in a little Melody off camera from a previous song of mine and what I basically want to do is just start cycling through settings and presets build up a little tune if I can and kind of just explore what this thing can sound like in a fairly laid-back way [Music] so turn up some release on that [Music] that uh warble is aggressive so a few things to note right off the bat you've got this analog knob which just controls the amount of I believe analog modeling and so the higher this gets the more you're gonna have like phase cancellation and horrible and [Music] um that kind of unpredictable nature of things I believe this is a global control yes you do also have decently in-depth LFO controls so you can hear how ramp is a bit of the way up so that vibrato takes a second to kick in it slowly is brought in and then I can turn off that Alpha entirely controls with Q Links of course [Music] we're going to bring noise back for some bass stuff in a bit I think you've also got sync for the LFO which will just sync it to your Project's Tempo and then resync which will basically just re-trigger the LFO anytime you hit a new note I'm gonna keep that off for now dedicated low cuts foreign controls for your filters versus your amp envelopes whereas on the main screen um stuff is a little more as far as I can tell simplified so you kind of choose how in depth you want to go with this so you can hear how the filter and the amp envelope are linked together but then we can decouple them if we want so you can kind of choose how faithful to the original you want to be or how in depth with kind of more modern controls you want to go which is kind of neat I know I sound like I'm advertising this I just am trying to relay hopefully useful information because like I said I have no interest in selling you this and I don't even have a ton of experience with this yet and then you can choose your pitch Bend range here this does not do a pitch Bend this I believe actually ties your pitch Bend also to your filter which could get you some interesting results it's interesting to have an arpeggiator in here because I think normally I just go for the normal like MPC arpeggiator this isn't awkward so where's my Global cut off here we go I will say it does sound nice it's like a little dry but definitely vintage like dry in the way that a vintage synth is dry but it's got that Shimmer to it it captures both pretty well I think although to be fair what do I know I'm 25. I did not grow up with the Juno being the primary sound of popular music [Music] that's nice when we did this I want to reset this to kind of ring out a bit and then to bring down that warble again keep it restrained I think [Music] that'll do for now for this sound let's just start a new instance of Jura what I want to do is get a little bass going [Music] I appreciate that [Music] that's not what I'm looking for though it's pretty close so I'm going to turn down the envelope amount [Music] something sounding like a little more brittle than I want is that a technical term I have no idea so I think we just need to Tinker with the envelopes a bit more that's working a lot better for me and then also in this case I think I just want to do note repeat for a little like rolling bass line let's latch that hop back into program edit and figure out our Baseline [Music] let's get another track how's our CPU usage doing not bad I'm imagining this is supposed to be a fairly lightweight uh plug-in to run [Music] I like that oh that's the sound like literally that's the sound I was looking for so check this out [Music] so so far I'm having a good time I cannot yet say whether it is worth the whole 150 buckaroonies but to me it was worth the 80. as Superfluous as I might think this is as a product that exists as much as I'm like did this need to be made probably not uh I'm having a good time I will admit I like the convenience of having a nice sounding emulation on this thing or I think this would be really at home with the force but for whatever reason my brain just was screaming at me that I need to try it on on the NPC okay bass res should be good please do what I think it's gonna do I need a knee Arrow that's closer we haven't dug into the effects yet [Music] that's kind of nice okay I bet you we can shape this to be what I want it to sound like get like a subtle amount of noise going okay I'm never gonna toggle this on I don't care how authentic it sounds I just do not want that in my life No Chorus noise for me thank you very much how hard can we push this so we want this to go [Music] [Music] in there so we can increase the amount of that envelope I think [Music] that's hard to look out of by default nice [Music] where's my delay we got the stomach gurgle base so we just have to make sure that re-triggers when it when I really want it to [Music] that little clicking sound I've heard the legends of this we might have just encountered it so we're going to keep an ear out for that because that could be a problem [Music] foreign butt right up against the previous one that ought to work good good boy and yes that element's too much let's turn that down a bit how's our friend the CPU doing it's doing fine like I said lightweight plugin we can work with that see this is our old friend tube synth I don't want to play with you anymore tube synth what else we got we haven't done any pads yet this is like the space wave pad [Music] we're just gonna let this be a subtle layer but I will adjust it a little bit more Reverb more analog this just needs some serious dampening [Music] do we want some chords who wants some chords Factory Bank it's so funny to me the like looking back knowing where synths went seeing like this was supposed to be a brass sound this was supposed to be a trumpet and it's like now we just know these as their own like iconic sounds in their own right like they I wonder if they knew like that's not a piano that's a pluck [Music] see I'm a big fan of the factory Banks being in here let's get some actual chords up in here at the right patch for this but let's just get like something in there [Music] and let's go through some pads [Music] so do you hear the octave thing yeah the Reverb as an octave thing yeah why don't we just duplicate this whole thing so then I'm gonna solo this we're going more pads let's go bright this time okay that's ridiculous uh but it is fun well okay this is a tangent I feel like there's a bit of a missed opportunity on a on a standalone NPC to have a set of four faders as their own Q links I don't even know if that would be all that practical but I would enjoy it so you're probably starting to notice some saminess in the sound that's not entirely surprising ultimately you'd probably end up creating like some kind of go-to presets and then just like modifying them and writing as much as possible that's wide okay so quick tangent one thing I wanted to add was a little pitch Bend there so I need to figure out how to do such a thing okay so I got a legato let's turn up the Glide time Lee [Music] so we only want this to trigger during an overlapping note and uh I want that to be legato this should work excellent that's maybe a little fast what are words man all right you ready for me to spend like an interminable amount of time dialing this in okay so what I just did uh took a bit of extra effort and we're gonna cut most of it but um basically I set my lead patches to Legato and set my Glide to legato so if you play the notes disconnected from each other you won't get any Glide and it'll re-trigger every time but if you hold stuff down it won't re-trigger and it will Engage The Glide so now we get this lovely little note bump that you'll hear if you're patient that's working for me so let's add one more important thing and that is an arp and I'm gonna be a good boy I'm going to try to stick to the actual ARP in this thing so ARP poly I need to bring the chords back for this [Music] if you slow that down this becomes like uh retro space documentary and I'm here for it let's go through a few more [Music] [Applause] interesting foreign doesn't really fit with this mix but I can dig it [Music] Space Mountain type beat I actually messed with that heavily that's so while this was a fairly like quick and surface level exploration of the jurupt plug-in hopefully it was useful and hopefully it showed you kind of a synthwave producer's perspective of using it to build up a song idea this video definitely leaned pretty positive I didn't really know how positive or negative I was going to be about this going in but I ended up quite liking it it does sound really nice is it worth 150 bucks I'm not sure I think that's going to depend on the individual person I'm glad I didn't have to pay that full amount because I got it while it was on its introductory sale I'm sure it'll go on sale again at some point uh however I do want to put in your brain a pretty important uh caveat and I've talked about this in the past but basically uh when you're spending extra money on stuff in the Akai ecosystem it can feel a little bit like you're building on a foundation of sand like they've made good paid extra DLC essentially but they've still got a lot of Jank kind of hiding under the surface like in my case when I went to install this plug-in first of all it just acknowledged that I had activated it and then insisted that I needed to go activate it with no further explanation and I even tried inputting my full long ass serial number and it still didn't like it and in this case that was solved by a simple reboot but now my splice integration is still not updating properly so I want you to keep this in mind I think Akai has made quite a nice little Juno emulation plugin and I quite like it but be prepared to put up with some Jank be prepared to put up with some kind of broken elements that really shouldn't be broken and really should have been fixed a long time ago they seem like they get around to fixing bugs eventually for the most part but I feel like this is a really necessary caveat to anything in the Akai ecosystem to put in your brain anyway if you'd like to see me make synthwave on the NPC without any of the paid plugins you can check out this video up over here and if you'd like to see a completely different Juno emulation or Recreation you can check out this video up over here thank you so much for watching and I'll be back with a new video in a little bit

Channel: Gabe Miller Music

Views: 15,575

Keywords: gabemiller1, Gabe Miller, Gabe Miller Music, EDM, Electronic music, electronic dance music, electro, groovebox, music production

Id: 6XVn0hXcn3M

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023