Howard Jones Spotlights the Jupiter-8 Synth He Bought in 1983

Howard Jones has never been shy about his love for synthesizers. A year after surprising fans with the admission that he’d never previously owned a Prophet-5, he’s now posted a video that returns to an instrument deeply woven into his own history. The Roland Jupiter-8 he bought in 1983 remains, in his words, “the king of synths” and “always will be my favourite.” The clip, shared on his YouTube channel, walks through the machine’s controls with the kind of casual intimacy only decades of use can produce.

Jones recalls paying around £8,000 for the Jupiter-8 at a time when that sum felt enormous. “I didn’t have that kind of money, but I had to have one of these,” he says. The original retail price in 1981 had been closer to £4,000, but demand and scarcity pushed costs up fast. Today, a comparable figure would sit somewhere near £20,000, though the synth’s current value is measured less in currency than in what it represents within Jones’s catalogue. It’s the sound behind early hits and the constant presence in a rig that evolved around it.

What makes the video more than a gear walkthrough is the way Jones treats the instrument as a living partner. He admits he doesn’t fully understand every knob, then demonstrates exactly how he coaxes out the tones he needs. That kind of honesty, delivered without nostalgia-bait or glossy production, fits a moment when the synth’s own legacy keeps growing. Roland reissued the Jupiter-8 in limited form years ago, but hearing it from someone who never let go of his original underscores the gap between collecting and genuinely knowing a machine. For anyone who values synthesisers as musical instruments rather than mythology, it’s a quietly instructive watch.