MATRIXSYNTH: Roland sh201 patch creation part1


Saturday, October 01, 2016

Roland sh201 patch creation part1


Published on Oct 1, 2016 synth-love

"An exploration of the Roland sh-201 synthesizer. Includes the sh201 supersaw.

Various thoughts on the sh-201 (especially vs the jp 8000)

Short version, if you can get a JP-8000 there is little reason to buy the sh-201. However, the sh-201 is a great synth and not as crippled as it may appear. Nearly all parameters are accessible from the synth via various key combinations.

The sound is different with the sh-201 being a bit more raw to my ears. The JP-8000 sounds smoother. The sh-201 has a lot of aliasing on high notes. It did not show up in normal use but interesting for testing purposes. If I had to guess I would think that perhaps the sh-201 has parts of the audio path and/or dsp that are cheaper than the jp-8000. This gives bad sound in the high notes but actually makes the mid-range sound very nice and raw.

The envelopes seems tuned a bit strange - hard to get the right feel and seems to be a bit of dead space on the filter env amount slider.

It is very hard to come to a judgement on the sh-201 supersaw vs. the jp-8000. I have recorded some video to address this in particular.

The sh-201 distortion/overdrive is very useful but not like the jp8080 distortion. The jp8080 rack distortion is much more flexible. The jp8000 has no distortion at all.

The reverb is nice but I would take the JP-8000 chorus + delay over it. I feel I could get similar reverb elsewhere. The JP-8000 delay and chorus are special. The sh-201 delay can be made to give chorus and it does widen the sound nicely.

It is easy to double the patch memory by programming separate sounds for the upper and lower tone. I was not aware of an easy way on the sh-201 to make arbitrary pairings for splits and layers though.

The synth is very light. Construction seems ok - mine had an issue where the mod lever would activate itself and could only be fixed by a reboot. I only had the synth for a few weeks and did not attempt to fix it.

Also of note, the random and sample and hold LFO's are nice but slower than the JP-8000. I could not achieve a nice noise-lfo type sound with the fastest modulation."

Update:

Roland SH-201 Patch Creation Part 2

Published on Oct 7, 2016

"More testing of the Roland SH-201.

:00 max lfo speeds
:50 Drum tests
4:51 portamento tests"

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