Programming the Roland SH-1000 - You Won't Believe What You Find!

video upload by Andy Whitmore

"Roland SH-1000 - Programming & the ten classic factory patches

The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact synthesizer produced in Japan, and the first synthesizer produced by Roland.It resembles a home organ more than a commercial synth, with coloured tabs labelled with descriptions of its presets and of the "footage" of the divide-down oscillator system used in its manually editable synthesizer section. It produced electronic sounds that many professional musicians sought after whilst being easier to obtain and transport than its Western equivalents.

The synthesizer has 10 simple preset voices combined with a manually editable section which can be manually tweaked around to create new interesting sounds. No user program memory is available. Its effects include white noise generator, portamento, octave transposition, two low frequency oscillators and a random note generator.

Even with a single oscillator, it sounds like there are several thanks to the 8 sub-osc keys. The ninth is the (white or pink) noise.

The SH-1000 is a monophonic analog synth with a single oscillator feeding a lowpass filter, an ADSR envelope, and two LFOs. It features 10 Preset sounds, but they are pretty weak. Fortunately you can create your own sounds for some really great mono-synth bass, lead, percussion and FX sounds. Basic square, ramp and pulse-width waveforms are available from the oscillator and the LFOs have sine, square and sample+hold. It has a terrific ‘Growl’ and ‘Wow’ effect for a pretty scary analog sound. It also features white noise, pink noise, portamento, octave transposition and a Random Note Generator. Although there is no user memory, unique sounds can still be quickly recreated or discovered thanks to its simple interface."