Once upon a time, we played the absolute shit out of a nineties Roland JC-120 – every math rocker, prog shredder, and pedal head only had good things to say about it, and so when our roommate moved on to DJ and sound design, they told us, “you can just have it.” We were pretty much in shock – we had just started playing in bands like Childspeak and Muscle Beach Petting Zoo, two bands that were similar in nature but had very different tonal spectrums. The JC-120 of course, could easily handle both.
However, this particular amp, as cool as it was, didn’t just fall into our lap through circumstance – our roommate Tiana was the first real and organic friend we made after moving to Eugene, Oregon from Saint George, Utah, and our friendship was very musical from the beginning. We worked at a local cafe together, and within a day or two of talking about gear, Tina invited me and another couple of buddies to drive up to Seattle in search of derelict, under-utilized instruments.
Now, this Jazz Chorus we’re talking about, keep in mind, is in the living room at home. It comes in later. From what we can remember, we did bring home a bizarre Peavey stereo amp with speakers cocked out 30 degrees each, and a rare synthesizer that we sat through toughly four hours of traffic for. We were just in it for the ride, it was good to feel seen – at the time, we were just getting to know the community that we’d end up falling in love. We didn’t have more than a handful of friends, and most of them were from – in fact, they were all back home, but we had found a far more fitting one. Things didn’t take long.
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So fast forward to nearly a year later – we’re working at the local Guitar Center, we’re playing in MBPZ, we’re drumming for Thom Simon, and I was wreaking absolute havoc with a Peavey Delta Blues 2×10. The amp had a great drive sound and a good spread for live shows, so if you stood near it and the overdrive was on, you could feel it in your hair and your jeans and shit. For such a little cab, it was always a surprise, and this was a huge improvement from what we were used to when assisting Era Coda with live shows, where we either used an Orange Micro Dark or a Hughes and Kettner Tubemeister for an all-too-quiet sound out a massive 4×12 cabinet. We were barely finally comfortable with our tones again when we got the call that the guitar player for our besties in Childspeak had left the band, and we were in line to replace them.
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Things moved so fast at that point – we don’t always remember which amps we had at which shows. We remember talking to Juan Chi of Zeta about the magic of Peavey 2×10’s, but we also remember playing the JC-120 the night MBPZ almost broke up over being too tired to play a house show with Spiller. We remember walking / rolling the JC-120 through droves of people from one set to another at the Eugene Block Party, only to realize the Andrew had packed up our guitar with his on accident and left hours ago. Thank Christ we were able to convince him to come back, even if the guitar immediately was suffering from some kind of heat stroke after unpacking it, constantly sinking pitch on the B and G strings. But anyway.
Eventually, Sam Mendoza from Spiller ended up buying this fabled JC-120, and we bought Sam’s monstrous Fender Hot Rod Deville 4×10 months later, which became our loudest, and most favorite amp of all time, at least of one’s that we’ve owned. Why wasn’t our favorite the JC-120? Well, we’re glad you asked.
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We were fucking amateurs.
Probably the biggest revelation an aggressive guitar player can gave with the Roland JC-120 is that pick attack = volume, and strictly that. It’s not like playing tube amp where digging in can excavate this micro-frequencies that are universally pleasing – typically, on the JC-120, the pick attack bounces at a particular transient stage where it’s as bright as possible. Technically, this cleanliness is part of the amp’s charm, and as many have noted, you can filter this of course with pedals, but it was getting exhausting. It was always rewarding to find the sweet spot for given rooms or ideas, but it became sort of a tap dance to isolate warm and fuzzy sounds against the shrill frequencies that bandmates found not just annoying, but alarming, as nobody was used the tin-y sound we were unintentionally producing. It was incredibly fun either way, but we ended up going back to a little bass amp for a while before picking up Sam’s Hot Rod Deville.
Also, that particular JC-120 had one more bizarre chapter to it that all the sudden left it feeling haunted in our minds. Back in the beginning of the article, we talked about Tiana taking us up to Seattle in search of gear. One of the other people in the car was clearly a little older, and having a sort of midlife degradation trip full of poetic despair. He didn’t feel dangerous, he was in fact beyond kind and exceptionally well spoken. At some point, he had blacked out some of the letters on the back of the JC-120’s speakers to resemble his name, which we won’t spell out. But he also continued to descend in his journey through mental health, and eventually snapped after accusing multiple people of being in a vast conspiracy to keep tabs on him. We never learned what for, and we never heard what happened to him after he made his beliefs via email. Eventually, it felt right that the JC-120 find a home that didn’t have anything to do with that baggage, and Sam Mendoza’s beyond capable hands made for a perfect landing place.
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But you know how it is. This was all between the years 2015 and 2017. As time marches on, you remember the good more than the bad, and sometimes you wonder what you could have done to find another way… it’s just that you can get stuck in that loop forever. And honestly, we never really thought twice about having to haul the uniquely weighted chassis of the JC-120 around again. The Deville was heavier, but more centered. We were always scared of what would happen to the Roland if we bonked it too hard, because we have a habit of doing that. And yet…
… here we are again, mouths watering at the sight of our old friend, this time completely weightless.
Just like you, we’re a little weary of potentially having yet another cloud-based service hovering in and around our sessions, but some of the tones we’ve produced in demos by Justus West and John Baizley are beyond impressive. We’ve got all stages of gain down pat in our DAW’s, but for clean, we’re always experimenting. How dry is too dry? How wet is too wet? You think you know, but then you bring in the full mix and it’s back to square one. With the JC-120, you can still experiment, but you don’t have to work nearly as hard to get a genuinely great clean tone that’s not anemic or brittle sounding.
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It’s worth expanding on for a moment that clean tone is still a journey for many of us using plugins, if not a downright struggle at times – even when a clean Direct Input guitar sounds good, you can tell it’s DI with those insanely high whistle frequencies that poke out.
For instance, Tosin Abasi’s clean section on his Archetype Abasi Suite from Neural DSP is an immense strength, but also a bit of a head-scratcher if you go in blind. Part of the reason that channel works so well with Tosin’s technique is because he is beating the absolute shit out of those strings, pushing those transients to the next level. Those strings are a couple gauges higher than average, and they’re also tuned exceptionally low. So when you check all those boxes, it sounds great and you just need to EQ it a bit. We routinely use the plugin for extended-range destruction on some upcoming TRELLYS, and we’re left far from wanting.
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But if you throw a six-string in standard through there, especially a clean one with single-coil pickups, the DI can quickly overwhelm with its piercing sharpness. There are easy workarounds of course, from the 10-band onboard EQ to using other plugins pedals to shape the overall sound, but compared to a number of guitar all-in-one plugins, the Archetype Abasi is routinely considered one of the more advanced.
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The JC-120 doesn’t dumb itself down for the digital transfer, but its simplicity is slightly expanded on when compared to the solid-state classic. There are expanded capabilities like stereo routing, reverb, ambience, and more has us giddy just thinking about it. Even the distortion has been reworked, which was literally our only complaint from the original. It was always too “box-y” and square – now there’s a lot more play between the distortion level and your input level, which can be further enhanced by using either a High or Low input channel depending what you’re throwing into it.
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We do miss the days where we could just buy the licensed plugin, type in the key, and, you know, own the damn thing, but hey. We’re trying to be more open minded over here, and we know from experience that if you’re open to fundamentally excellent clean tones, you will only be rewarded, so this thing certainly seems worth a try. Basically, we’re just waiting for a bonus or two to check this thing out. At the end of the day, for those of us looking to step up our clean game, it’s a no-brainer.
Math rockers, be not afraid – take a chance on an actually licensed plugin that seems all but proven to inject a liveliness into your playing that’s been coveted since 1975. Wow, all of this and we didn’t even talk about the chorus, huh? Forget it. You’ll have to hear it for yourself – just try not to think that it’s entirely possible that you were conceived during a song or record that heavily featured the original JC-120.
Check it out here.
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