Vintage Synth Explorer

Roland • SH-101

The SH-101 is very cool, especially for techno, drum&bass and ACID! It's a monophonic bass synthesizer. Its sound lies somewhere between the TB-303 and a Juno bass sound. 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.

Unfortunately there is no patch memory storage and although it has no MIDI there are upgrades available for it from many analog service companies that will allow you to incorporate it into any MIDI studio environment. It can also be controlled by MIDI using a CV/MIDI converter. It's great for bass sounds or bubbly analog effects. They come in three different flavors - gray, blue or red (there was a VERY rare white version too)! It can also be strapped on like a guitar for live performance using the optional Hand Grip.

It is used by Orbital, Future Sound of London, Überzone, The Prodigy, 808 State, The Grid, Cirrus, Eat Static, Jimmy Edgar, Apollo 440, Devo, Union Jack, Luke Vibert, Dirty Vegas, Josh Wink, the Crystal Method, Aphex Twin, Astral Projection, Les Rythmes Digitales, Sense Datum, Squarepusher, Sascha Konietzko of KMFDM/MDFMK, Freddy Fresh, Lab-4, Nitzer Ebb, the Chemical Brothers and many more.

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Posting Rules: Please keep your comments relevant! Do not post requests for help, do not use for sales, do not post unless you have something interesting to say about this instrument, or we may delete your post.

 

Benny

Posted 2 days ago

People still care who used what? Anyways, what can be said about the synth itself? Not much, its very simple and very limited, the sound is indeed pleasant but its hardly unique and for what these cost these days, you can get miles more potential, wether it be mono or poly, analog or digital etc. I know its pointless to complain about it, its the way market is heading and people with big wallets and little reason gladly pay 1200+ dollars for one of these (yes, I've seen them go for this). Don't get me wrong, I'd love one but for me the sound matters so much more than the badge, and while the 101 sounds great its certainly not its sound people pay for.

your name

Posted 11 days ago

ceephax used one to : )

Your Name

Posted 23 days ago

ceephax uses one : )

Lamster

Posted 34 days ago

I had 2 of these many moons ago sold them both for peanuts at the time best thing I ever did. Then they became very popular through techno now I wish I still had them .
So that I could sell them again to these mugs for more money and buy something decent. As mono analog synths go the flashy look with the mod grip and the fact that every 80's pop star has been pictured poseing with one blinded people to the fact that they were well just ordinary and you could get the same sort of sound out of a yamaha cs01 for about 50 quid at the time And for the same money as the sh101 there were better synths about

LiqMat

Posted 39 days ago

Wow! This really brings back memories when I was in my first band in 1987. This basically was used for special effects in our so called band. Never really used it to its full potential. I paired this with my Casio CZ-1 keyboard.

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