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, Boards of Canada and many more.

Robert Wilsdon

January 24, 2009 @ 12:51 pm

I had 2 of these at the same time, both sounded different! One really hard and aggressive and the other quite soft/mellow?? what's that all about? Turn the volume right up to 'overdrive the signal and they sound very Josh wink. Such good fun simple synth capable of great sounds, happy memories.

Platform-1.co.uk

January 13, 2009 @ 8:05 am

I painted mine, removed the keyboard and reboxed it after I had another one stolen. Still use it with midi-cv conversion today. Classic sound. Top synth.

planetplayer

January 12, 2009 @ 7:18 pm

Very nice. Think sounds because so many may be mixed for 1 mono note. Played it for hours in early 1980's. I remember the flashing LEDs and it sounded like a little Juno and and SH put together. I believe this was the last attempt with VCO based system.

Ric

December 27, 2008 @ 5:30 pm

This is the 1st synth I bought and the reason why I became an analog synth lover . it's so simple yet it teaches you so much.

Michael Ogorodov

December 21, 2008 @ 9:33 am

I have a red one! Great!
Very simple & powerful synth!
But some trouble with pitch poti!

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