All about the Roland Jupiter-series

I've had a great deal of success with pad sounds from my JP-6. The 
thing that seems to help is the manual cross-mod, even without sync.

If you set up the VCO mod to only mod VCO-2, and use some LFO mod 
(just enough to get some tuning variation, and keep the LFO speed 
low), you can get some sweeping detuning of the two VCO's. But, the 
real gem is the xmod.

By using LFO PWM and selecting Pulse waves on VCO-2, any manual xmod 
of VCO-1 will be phase-inverted with respect to the LFO phase on VCO-
2. The trick is setting the xmod up carefully enough to stay musical 
(or just pin it if you're going for something else).

Add a slight bit of ENV-1 mod to VCO-2 (use the VCO-2 fine tune to 
compensate for any severe drift) and it's time to enter the filter 
zone.

Some minor notes here - the xmod trick will produce some very 
inconsistent results if the JP-6 is out of calibration. For the most 
consistency voice-to-voice, the xmod calibrations need to be almost 
dead-on (which, in a 20+year old synth is a trick in itself).

This gives me a ton of movement within the pitch of the voice - it's 
off to the filter and go.

I also recently went through every patch on the board and lowered my 
VCA gain to about 6 on all LPF patches in order to use the remaining 
gain on the resonant HPF and BPF patches. It seemed to make a big 
difference.

Hope this helps,
Adam