I wonder if you could really get Korg/Roland/Akai/M-Audio interested in adding OSC?

Seems like if the big HW makers switch over, things will flow from there.

I think the divisions are meaningless in themselves. Only the sound matters, and a good sound is a good sound whatever makes it; other than to understand why something sounds good, when something almost identical sounds quite undistinguished, any claim of superiority verges into the clouded lands of audiophilic thinking.

Seriously, I believe the Juno 6/60 used hardware LFO and EGs, whereas the Alpha Junos generated them in software.

Even with patch memory and DCOs, I think the JUNO-60 by modern standards counts as an analog synth. Our perspective has, of course, shifted. It shouldn’t have used the word “original,” probably. (Well, it was an original JUNO-60. Okay, lame excuse.)

I’m not sure how it’s possible for me to “shill” for a keyboard that hasn’t been manufactured since the Reagan administration. (I’m also not getting a subsidy from the walnut growers of America, in case you’re wondering.) I disclosed the Roland sponsorship. I don’t think I crossed an editorial line, but it seems what you’re really claiming is that I said something that was inaccurate, and upon re-reading that, I can see that perspective.

We don’t have editors. I’m the editor. And, in a sense, you’re the editor – but that’s why these conversations are fruitful. It’s very possible that in print we could have nitpicked over my copy, but very often you don’t get into in-depth conversations like the one we’re having. So I do appreciate the corrections; I hope I don’t appear that I’m taking it personally, because I do this primarily in order to talk to people.

As for what you’re saying about OSC, it’s simply not accurate, unless you mean “currently commercially available.” There’s an OSC implementation for various microcontrollers (including but not limited to the Arduino), so you can absolutely make hardware that sends sweepable OSC values. The code above shows you how you could do it with control voltage.

Also, it’s just plain wrong to claim that MIDI allows you to work with the computer turned off and OSC doesn’t. That’s not true. You can use OSC between two pieces of hardware. I think that this is a wide misconception, though.

You’re right, though – this has nothing to do with the JUNO, necessarily, although as I said, if you look back to the time the JUNO-60 was made, there were transformations in play that would not have been intuitive at the time. So the engineers of the JUNO-60 might not have imagined that they’d go to an all-digital architecture, let alone that at a NAMM in the 21st Century a new Moog would use the absence of patch memory or MIDI as a selling point. I don’t think people had a clear sense that MIDI was coming. And while MIDI worked shortly thereafter, I don’t know that it was the only — or even the best — solution, or that it was seen that way at the time.

It was off topic here, but … yeah, that “no editors” thing.

By the way, OSC may be newer than MIDI, but many of the underlying technologies are not. TCP/IP evolved around 1973-4. Serial technology is, in turn, much, much older, but MIDI doesn’t conform to what were standard serial implementations even at its inception.