A year in the making, circuit modeled after my very own, meticulously restored Roland Juno-6 hardware unit — the iconic synth behind countless 80s hits and neon-soaked soundtracks. Lush pads, shimmering choruses, and that unmistakable analog warmth, right in your DAW. Out now.
Includes the EightySix Chorus as a separate effect plugin — use that JUNO-6 style chorus on any other track or instrument in your DAW. Avalable for Mac & PC.
My Roland JUNO-6 emulation.
Saw, pulse, and sub oscillator per voice, just like the original. The pulse oscillator has manual and LFO-driven pulse width modulation. All waveforms and levels are modeled after my Juno-6.
The classic Juno low-pass ladder filter with resonance, plus a high-pass filter. Modulation by envelope, LFO, and keyboard tracking. Sounds and behaves like the real thing — I spent a lot of time getting this one right.
The iconic Juno chorus with Mode I and Mode II, measured from the real hardware. Front-panel buttons give you the original settings, or tweak the knobs to go beyond.
ADSR envelope and sine LFO, matched to the original timings. PWM has three modes (envelope, manual, LFO) just like the front panel of the real synth.
Not yet implemented. Coming in a future update.
EightySix features the DarkStar Reverb and Delay engine to bring your sound to the next level.
Starfarer Pluck
Sensation Brass
Squarred Pluck (PWM automation)
Space Guitar
Wow Pad
Drone
In the mix
Authentic Chorus BBD Noise
EightySix is a circuit-modeled emulation built from measurements taken on my own restored Juno-6. The oscillators, filter, envelope, LFO, and chorus are each modeled from the corresponding hardware sections rather than approximated with generic virtual-analog building blocks.
Transfer functions are derived from the actual circuit topology of the original synth, focusing on the sections where component-level behavior is audible — the filter nonlinearity, the chorus BBD characteristics, the envelope curves. Where component-level precision isn't perceptible, lookup tables and optimizations are used to keep CPU usage reasonable. The DSP is written in Faust.
The measurements were taken from a Juno-6 that I've owned and maintained for years. The focus was on capturing the behavior of each circuit section under varying conditions — how the filter responds across its range, how the BBD chorus colors the signal, how the envelopes shape over time — rather than just sampling static snapshots of the output.
The voice architecture, filter, envelope, LFO, and chorus are modeled from the hardware. The reverb and delay are original additions not present on the Juno-6 — they're my go-to effects, designed for my first two albums and used alongside the Juno ever since. The reverb is a granular shimmer design inspired by the Strymon BigSky and Eventide processors with a smeared, textural character of its own, and the delay is a lofi tape delay with charming wow and flutter, highly inspired by Nils Frahm's pairing of the Juno-6 with vintage Roland Tape Echoes.
MAC
macOS Ventura (13.6) or higher
(Apple Silicon Macs supported)
64-bit only
PC
Windows 10 or 11
64-bit only
LINUX
x86_64
64-bit only
VST3 (PC/MAC/Linux), AU (Mac only)
Current version: v1.1.2 (changelog)
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