With the right firmware mod (that’s right – no mysterious hacky soldered in dials) for old board Roland EM-101 machines, the EM-101 is no longer a preset machine. Often billed as a cutdown Juno 106 restricted to just 24 presets, this box previously had some interesting uses but didn’t really deliver as an anlogue beast in my arsenal. It was too restricted. Until now. Due to the amazing work by Ryan (Plutoniq), the EM-101 has been give a new lease of life and transformed into a strong addition to my music making and since the parameters can now be controlled over midi CC, I have written an editor to load in presets from the Juno 106 and MKS-7, extended to a new Roland EM-101 format with naming and created a preset saving system and librarian for patch recall. It’s not a Juno 106 but it is a very nice sounding a machine with it’s own character sharing a lot of parallels. If I have understood correctly (there could be inaccuracies!), it has a M5232RS tone generator chip with 36 (I think) waveforms that are beautifully shaped by Roland analogue fitters. A good example is the IR3109 VCF filter, found in a the Jupiter 8 or M5241L VCA found in the MKS-70. If you look at the chip list, there are lots of shared electronics that overlap between Junos, Juipter and other quality Roland gear of it’s time, giving it character. Notably, the MN3009 and MN3101 chorus chips shared by the Juno 106 chorus. It has interesting analogue effects on board but the chorus particularly shines due to the much greater CC control (as you can see from the screenshot). That chorus is gorgous, adds that analogue sheen and processing. I spent last night building up a preset bank for the EM-101 to release with the editor (and check bank functionality) and got lost inside this little beauty.
In this blog post, I will detail work on the editor
for the enhance Roland EM-101.
Alpha version of the editor/plugin
Alpha version of the editor/plugin
In order to perform saves, I wrote a preset system based on SysEx. While the modification doesn’t enable SysSex, this format is a really useful standard for loading presets and therefore, I wrote it’s own version which can hoover up Juno 106 too. At the moment, it is 76 bytes long with 10 bytes reserved for future upgrades. Later on, I’ll detail my SysEx strategy below in case anyone wants to cross pollinate. Presets are great though because it means as a community, we can share our wonderful sound designs and push the limits of this box.
Juno patches do not contain a name for SysEx ASCII naming, therefore I added my own Juno label to signify Juno presets. EMMY1OH1 patches have naming and category information.
For the preset import, I created a VCA/VCF switch so that when loading in Juno 106/MKS-7 presets, you can swap them over for interesting sound designs.
To load a bank, set your folder root and then double click on a bank. Single presets will produce a file picker.
Emmy1OH1 ported as an Audio Unit and with automation.
and the presets, accessible through an easy access drop down menu.
The release is ready! Complete the form below to grab a copy.
I have been asked a few times about how I upgrade hardware chips for my vintage gear. I do not have anything specifically for the EM-101 and cannot provide any guidance with this. I do have a generic guide which I pretty much use for all of my vintage gear upgrades (link).