Vintage Synth Explorer

Roland • SH-5

The SH-5 is a classic yet very advanced monophonic synthesizer rivalled mainly by its successor, the SH-7. The SH-5 has just about two of everything. There are two analog VCOs with triangle, ramp, square and pulse waveforms, two LFO's, two filters, two VCA's, white and pink noise generators, and more.

The oscillators can be modulated by the LFOs or the ADSR envelope generator. The two LFOs include controls for rate and waveshape: ramp, reverse ramp, triangle, sine, square, delay; and there is also a Sample + Hold feature. The two multi-mode filters include hi-pass, low-pass, and band-pass filtering with cutoff, resonance, keyboard tracking, envelope sensitivity (AR, ADSR or preset) and modulation (ramp, sine, square, s+h) controls plus an additional band-pass-only filter. The two VCAs offer Attack/Release and ADSR envelopes which can be triggered by the Sample + Hold, LFO #2 or an external audio trigger input.

Extra features include the standard SH-type Mixer section with 5 sliders to adjust noise, VCO1, VCO2, ring mod and an external signal levels. Each of these 5 signals can be individually sent through the VCA, the multi-mode filter, the band-pass filter or both. The SH-5 even has stereo output with panning controls in the VCA section and portamento! The Ring Modulator alone is enough to wet your appetite for this synth. A serious analog mono-synth with lots of flexibility for creating serious electronic and dance music. It has been used by Eat Static and Freddy Fresh.

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matt

Posted 39 days ago

yeah, good luck getting one of these for $450-$800.

so many of the estimated values on this site are way out of line with reality.

Guillermo Tin

Posted 192 days ago

... and Simon Posford aka.Hallucinogen! :)

Micke

Posted 211 days ago

The SH-5 has also been used by Rational Youth, Chris Carter/Throbbing Gristle, Tyndall (German synth-duo) and Kitaro.

Graham

Posted 393 days ago

You are right about the PWM, it definitely had this feature. You could select which LFO controlled the PWM and could select (from memory) between sine, ramp and square waves for the LFO. I owned one for a long time (bought it in the late 70's and only sold it about 5 years ago - for almost as much as what I originally bought it for!). I was just listening to some of my old recordings last night and realised what a great sound you could get out of this synth.

Alen

Posted 416 days ago

This is the first synth I ever spent any time noodling around on, aside from in a music store (they would let a kid play around on the expensive stuff only so long). I rented one for a week around '76 or '77, eager to experiment and try to recreate for myself the kinds of sounds I was hearing on Larry Fast's inspirational first Synergy album (I couldn't afford to rent a mini Moog!).

One of the things I remember very clearly was that it had PWM, since I was amazed at the fat sounds I got from that. But PWM is not mentioned here as a capability. Can anyone else confirm that it has it? I know the SH-7 has PWM, but there's no mistaking the two synths. What I rented was an SH-5.

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