Roland JV-880

The Roland JV-880 is a nice 1U tone module, the forerunner to the famous JV-1080 and JV-1020 units. The polyphony is 28 voices, it can simultaneously play 8 parts, and it has effects. It can hold 64 presets in bank A, another 64 presets in bank B, 64 user patches in the Internal bank, and 64 user patches on the RAM data card. You can insert 1 expansion waveform board and 1 expansion ROM card.

Here are some of the voice patches:

Here are the demo songs:

I had the JV-880 with a data card to hold custom user patches, and an expansion waveform ROM card. I chose the Country/Bluegrass Guitars card, because it seemed that the JV-880 could use a few more guitar patches and banjos and such. The best sounds on the unit are the classic Roland pads, the Juno/Jupiter analog-sounding warm pads. I sold the JV-880 because I have a JV-1010, which has all the same sounds, plus additional sounds and more banks of patches.

Update: Sometimes I miss the JV-880, because it had a nice multi-character LCD display so you could read what you were doing, move patches around, and easily save changes/settings. The JV-1010 just has a tiny 3 character display, so the interface is not very good - it pretty much ends up being a ROMpler and you never edit the patches. I have an XV-5050 now, which has updated/improved versions of all the old JV sounds, plus room for 2 SRX slots which also have undated versions of JV sounds as well as new sounds. I chose the Vintage Keys board to get great old EPs and keyboards, and the Drums boards just because it was cheap and the XV needed better variety of drum kits.

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