Thursday, May 23, 2019
Roland SH-2 | Black Box Skank
Published on May 23, 2019 Alex Ball
"The Roland SH-2 from 1979 is one vintage piece I’d never seen in the flesh and one that wasn’t physically in my 'Land of the Rising Sound' documentary, so it’s great to be able to cover it on the channel.
Huge thanks to Ian Livingstone for the loan.
It reminds me of the SH-7 and SH-1 in terms of sound and the “auto bend” is very much in keeping with the early SH models, but then it’s also quite clearly a step towards the later SH-101 in terms of its layout. Quite an interesting one!
The SH-2 has Sine, Sawtooth, Square and PWM available on oscillator 1 and Noise, Sawtooth, Square and PWM on oscillator 2. There’s also a sub-oscillator, which really beefs things up.
It has one LFO (Sine, Square and S&H) with delay that can modulate pulse width, oscillator-frequency, filter cut-off and also trigger the one envelope. The filter is low-pass and can self-oscillate. There’s also portamento and adjustable auto-bend as mentioned earlier.
The SH-2 had a little brother with a single oscillator, the SH-9 (which I’ve never played). I’m guessing it’s very similar in a kind of Korg MS-20 / MS-10 sibling way. If you’ve played both, let me know!
There’s a few specific things I did such as taking the CV/Gate out and hooking up the SH-101 that ran back through the “Ext Audio In” of the SH-2. That gave me 3 oscillators and 2 sub oscillators so that I could mix and detune footings and waveshapes.
I also ran midi to my TB-303 and fired on CV/Gate from that to the SH-2. The 303 also ran through the Ext Audio In so that the whole effect came through the same filter / envelope / VCA.
Instruments Used:
Roland SH-2 (1979)
Roland SH-101 (1982)
Roland TB-303 (1981)
Roland TR-606 (1981)
Sequential Drumtraks (1984)
DSi Prophet REV2 (2017)
Yamaha U3 Piano (stereo mic’d)
Ibanez JEM 7DBK / Fender Blues Junior II / Mic’d with an SM57
Some EMU Emulator and Fairlight stabs
Couple of Project Alpha Sounds
There’s also a Pro~One and Korg MS-20 doing some cameo FX that I added after and didn’t film."
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© Matrixsynth - All posts are presented here for informative, historical and educative purposes as applicable within fair use.
MATRIXSYNTH is supported by affiliate links that use cookies to track clickthroughs and sales. See the privacy policy for details.
MATRIXSYNTH - EVERYTHING SYNTH
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