Roland SH-1000

SH-1000

Manufactured by	Roland
Dates	1973-1981
Technical specifications
Polyphony	Monophonic
Timbrality	Monotimbral
Oscillator	1 VCO
LFO	2 sine/square/sh/noise
Synthesis type	Analog Subtractive
Filter	1 resonant lowpass, 1 highpass
Attenuator	1 ADSR
Aftertouch	No
Velocity sensitive	No
Memory	10 presets
Effects	None
Input/output
Keyboard	37 keys
External control	CV/Gate(for the vcf only)

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.

Although it has limited capabilities, with 10 simple preset voices, the SH-1000 has a manually editable section which can be manually tweaked around to create new interesting sounds. However, there is no user program memory available, so a musician would have to remember settings. Its effects include white noise generator, portamento, octave transposition, two low frequency oscillators and a random note generator.

Notable SH-1000 users

• The Band
• The Human League
• Blondie
• Jethro Tull
• The Rose Phantom (revideolized)
• Fad Gadget
• Jarvis Cocker (Pulp)
• Imagination
• Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music)
• Radio Massacre International
• Tetsuya Komuro

External links

• Vintage Synth Explorer's page on the SH-1000