Superbooth 21: Cherry Audio Mercury-4, a Roland Jupiter-4 emulation as plugin

September 19, 2021 Synth Anatomy Plugins, Software, Superbooth 2021 0

For Superbooth 21, Cherry Audio has released the Mercury-4 plugin, their software take on the iconic Jupiter-4 analog “compuphonic” Synthesizer from the late 1970s.

In the last few months / years Cherry Audio has become one of the most popular synthesizer plugin manufacturers. One of the reasons is definitely their business model. For little money, you get here solid synthesizer plugins with a rich feature set that emulate known devices.

For their new software product, they have chosen a well-known Synthesizer from the Jupiter range. Not the Jupiter-8 but the Jupiter-4, one of the most unique Jupiter synth. It has an aggressive, raw, juicy sound quality that could not be found in any other Jupiter synth.

Cherry Audio Mercury-4

The original unit featured 4 voices with stacking options a low & high pass filter, two envelopes, a single LFO, and all this topped with an ensemble/chorus effect. One of the special features of the Jupiter-4 was its presets that were located just under the keyboard. Also here Roland tried to emulate acoustic sounds like a piano, brass, organ… but in the end, it didn’t sound like it. And still, they became known as sounds.

Almost 50 years after the appearance of this hardware device, the Cherry Audio developers have captured the vibe of the Jupiter-4 in detail and packed it into a new affordable plugin emulation called Mercury-4. It recreates Jupiter-4’s bold and unusual analog oscillators, powerful dual filters, and an easily overdriveable VCA section. Plus, the classic arpeggiator section and original two massive unison modes.

New in the emulation is a drift mode to dial in just the right amount of vintage character, and a a space-echo style tape echo with multiple reverb modes. Mercury-4 ships with over 400 presets (75 from Huston Singletary) including the original from the front panel.