Thanx for asking! Nah, I didn't get much further along. I did come up with some nice new material after I got the Juno though. You ask what sort of music I do....It is a mixture of ambient, new wave, and progressive house/trance and other genres. All original. The Fashion Police have been my project since the '80s. A spin-off project I also do is called Nocturnal Waveforms. Actually, I have some Myspace music sites up you might wanna check out. There is a small taste of just a few tracks on them. Here are the URLs:
http://www.myspace.com/fashionpolicemusic
http://www.myspace.com/nocturnalwaveforms
http://www.myspace.com/robotiquerecordsmusic
As for the Juno, I am still trying to find the damn SIMM for it, (I heard it takes a Kingston DIMM memory 512 PC 133 -I heard the dang thing costs over a hundred quid! Yikes...a bit steep for a small circuit board with maybe twenty bucks worth of parts on it!) and have to sort out the proper (and biggest possible) memory card for it, be it a Smart Media or otherwise. (and those things are really overpriced...probably cost a few dollars tops to make, and they charge you eighty quid or so for a one gigger!)
I will continue to use the sequences in my other kit seperately...since I can't get the Juno to sync its drum parts and arpeggiator to them. Strangely I could easily get the 20 year old Casio Cosmosynth I had to lock right into the MIDI clock(crapped out the day after I got the Juno though....ribbon cable fatigued right off the glass on the display....vibration from using it live..it is on a guitar strap.) and it would sync its drum beats right up to anything I had....I used it for fills, and to play additional parts live. You'd think a machine that cost me over a grand (part in trade) would be able to do the same thing, (as in syncing right up like the little Casio did) but it don't.
Seems like more and more, companies are making things more for computers but are neglecting other users who are more comfortable working old-school ways, by leaving off crucial features for live hardware-only use. Most of us still do not use computers for music, and many of us don't want to. I tried various computer methods a few times, but was not impressed at all, to be honest...too fiddly and always some glitch would appear and derail the creative flow...and computers seem a tad mickey-mouse in comparison to a solid, heavily built peice of hardware for live performance. I will forever be recording old school ways. Most buyers of these sorts of synths probably prefer to do it the old way too.
Thats why I chose the Juno. Retro and solid.
The Juno is one of two new peices of kit I got within the last few weeks....The other one is a Boss BR-600. It replaced my VS-880 EX, which was too fiddly to use, and I dislike hard disc recording, having had it crash a few times on me, and only used it to record six tracks during the time I had it. So, when my Alesis Ion I tried to order could not arrive, due to a chip problem at the company, and I needed to upgrade my synths, I traded the VS in along with the six hundred quid I plopped down for the Ion, to get the Juno, shortly after I bought the BR-600. (Needless to say, the dealer made out good and was fat and happy....that VS, just a few years ago, when I got it, cost me as much as the Juno would have cost, and I plunked down six hundred quid for the Alesis that I couldn't get- on top of that!)
The BR-600 is a nice machine, but Roland put a USB port on it instead of MIDI. Since it is a stand-alone recorder, and most buyers (myself included) of a battery-powered portable multitrack with a built-in drum machine would choose NOT to use such a delightfully simple machine in a buggery computer-based system (which I don't have or want to bother with) it makes more sense to have MIDI to sync the drum machine to your other kit, instead of a USB port which is useless for me, and renderes the drum machine feature useless also if I wish to sync an arpeggiator or groovebox to it whilst recording.
Getting a memory card for it was a headache also, (nothing readily available at your local Sprawl Mart or Kmarts -which would have been cheaper- was matching the compatiblity list in the manual) and cost me eighty five quid extra ordering the same thing which happened to be on the list, from Radio Scrap....
Eighty five quid above the four hundred I paid for the recorder, which should have really been half that to begin with. (and why limit the card slots to just one, and limit the capacity to only one gig, when cards come in many times that?...Psst...hey Roland, how about having me, a real globally-famous recording artist, battling out in the trenches, give input in designing your kit to make it better for us all? I am looking for a new sponsor anyway.)
Anyhoo, back to the keyboards... I can sort of get the JX 305 to sync its arpeggiator...but that is about it. I get drum parts triggered in it too, as well as an arpeggiated part, whether or not I want it to, regardless of MIDI settings. If I don't use MIDI, I can't get them to sync, of course....The Juno doesn't use fractional BPM values, like the groovesynths do. And without MIDI, I have to jockey the tempo on the groovebox to stay in sync...it seems to be a fraction of a tenth of a BPM slower than the grooveboxes on an identical setting, unless MIDI is used...for example a 140 BPM setting on the Juno is really a tad less than 140.1 on the JX. So, I must use MIDI to sync....and then I get the unwanted parts triggered, even if I have the juno set to not send any note triggering messages....and the JX set to only recieve clock. Oh well. I sort of did a work-around by setting the drum sounds in the JX and the other mystery part that gets triggered to be a sound that works, but still, I would like to be able to get these bugs out of it.....and I would like to be able to specify when in the measure (as in the dead beginning of the drum loop) that changes come in and out when I trigger them either by the rhythm buttons on the Juno or by the Performance mode on the keyboard.
Well, thats all for now!
Will keep updated from time to time....
music for the space age
but defo try get as much ram as u can , its v-handy