Description
The Roland SH101 is a now legendary portable mono synth released in 1982 and produced until 1986. Portable enough for easy live use and complete with handgrip and strap for standing play it quickly became a staple for live acts needing that awesome Roland sound.
It’s an early 80s 32 key, monophonic analog synthesizer featuring a single oscillator, arpeggiator, portamento and loads of sliders to modulate filter and envelope parameters. It can also be strapped on like a guitar for live performance using the optional Hand Grip. It became popular long after its discontinuation, becoming a staple of electronic dance music in the 90s, used by Aphex Twin, Orbital, the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Boards of Canada, 808 State, the Grid, Squarepusher, and the Future Sound of London and more.
Perfect for techno, drum&bass and acid, its sound lies somewhere between the TB-303 and a Juno bass sound. and it has a lot of simple but cool features. You can control the VCF, pitch, LFO or all from the pitch bender. It has a white noise generator, arpeggiator with up, down and up/down patterns and a simple real-time sequencer. The LFO offers random, sine, square or noise waveforms. And normal or auto portamento effects give you that elastic bass sound. There are external clock inputs for the sequencer and arpeggiator, CV/GATE inputs and outputs and a CV hold pedal. It can also be controlled by MIDI using a CV/MIDI converter. It was released in four colours – red, grey, blue, and the very rare white.
