Can You Use A Phone Charger To Power A Roland JD-08?

The answer, is yes, yes you can. We’re using a 25W Hoco phone charger on a 2 meter USB-C cable to power our JD-08. Pretty much any brand should suffice, although if Roland offers their own special charger for these things, go with that, if you want.

We’re using a regular DIN-to-USB interface cable to connect the JD for MIDI, because running the JD entirely over USB was throwing super crazy MIDI signals into the synth that were triggering random parameters whether we wanted it or not.

Windows 11 is funny about MIDI, and so rather than fight with it forever, and we didn’t want to spend a king’s ransom on batteries, we opted to run the synth in a more traditional way.

Since the user manual is vague on what kind of external power these can safely run on, we rolled the dice, and went with a regular wall wart phone charger.

And, it works!

So if you ended up here from a google search that had previously given you little more than an aging Reddit thread, this nugget in 2025 is direct and authoritative from us here at Kulshan Studios.

Good luck!