Recording - November 2010 - 45

Externally speaking The SH-01 has 37 velocity-sensitive keys, with a light action and a firm but smooth bottoming out. With the transpose button you can produce (and transmit) the MIDI pitch range from 0–114 (± 3 octaves from center octave). The 3-way lever on the left does pitchbend up (right) and down (left) and modulation (forward). And on top left is the D-beam, Roland’s motion-sensing modulation tool. The SH-01 weighs only 9 lbs. 5 oz. and is only 27 inches wide. It can run on batteries, has the classic 5-pin MIDI In and Out ports, a USB port, a slot for a USB memory stick, four 1 /4" jacks (for headphones, for L/Mono and R output and for a pedal), and a DC socket for the cord from the proprietary adapter that has its own AC cable. On the top panel, at the far right, is a mini stereo input for an external sound source—lots of fun can be had with that! The classics: Osc—Filter—Amp—LFO The majority of the panel surface is taken up by the three classic synth modules Osc(illators), Filter, and Amp(lifier). To the left of the Osc portion is the LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) panel. So logical, so traditional, and so helpful! Play a few sounds and you might ask yourself why this little lightweight of a synth has such a huge sound. The reason: Its sound generator has three layers. You can stack three different tones if you wish, each with a different waveform and with different settings, lock the combined result into memory, and still make instant changes on the fly while you’re playing. The Oscillator is the sound source, of course, and you can choose saw, square, pulse (with pulse-width modulation), triangle, sine, noise, or super saw waveforms. Each waveform has two other variants you can call up before you even get to the filter section for tone shaping. The Osc section has the sync and modulation and tuning/detuning controls you’d expect, all out in the open.

The Filter section offers lowpass, highpass, bandpass, peaking (emphasizing the cutoff frequency region), and bypass settings. It can act on a –12 dB or –24 dB per octave slope, has knobs for cutoff frequency, resonance, and key follow, and sliders for an ADSR envelope generator with depth slider. The Amplifier section has a level knob and the four sliders for the ADSR envelope generator. The LFO (low-frequency oscillator) section operates on two levels. The more obvious way in which it works is the traditional way—you set up modulation intensity for every note you play, intensity of pitch, filter and amplitude modulation, with a rate (speed) and with a fade time (how quickly the LFO starts modulating a note); for that you select one of the six waveform shapes triangle, sine, saw, square, pulse, random. You also can sync the LFO to the arpeggiator and phrase recorder that we have yet to mention.

It is activated by waving a hand over the left top corner of the synth, thus breaking a light beam. How intensely it responds, and the polarity of the response (for example raising or lowering the pitch) can be programmed. It doesn’t let you do anything that you couldn’t do by other means, but it makes you look like a cross between a magician and a sorcerer, waving a hand in midair and doing drastic things your sound. There’s no business like show business, right? ~ Effects. This is where this traditional-looking synth with its open user architecture takes a flying leap into the digital age. If offers not just reverb and delay effects, but you can program, per user memory location, parameters for panning delay, distortion, fuzz, bit crash, flanger, phaser, and pitch shifter. The delays can be tempo sync’d, and there is a global Low-Boost on/off button.

The sound is what sold this synth to me. Rich, “analog-like”, in the best since of the metaphor, and in the fine tradition of the Juno/Jupiter line of venerable Roland keyboards.
The less obvious way of using the LFO is in setting up the modulation effect that will kick in when you activate the modulation lever, by pushing it forward. It’s great to have these two options—a predictably constant modulation for every note played, and a separate modulation that you activate spontaneously. Beyond the classics ~ D-Beam. On the far left is the DBeam section. In case this is news to you—this proprietary Roland device gives the player control over pitch or volume (or both), over a great many voice parameters, and over effects from the section on the far right that we haven’t discussed yet. Roland didn’t skimp on the quality of these effects, they are top notch. And they can be defeated with a simple button press, of course. ~ Phrase recorder. This is a rudimentary on-board sequencer that lets you record and store in memory eight licks, from one bar to eight bars in length. It works only with full bars of four beats, and records only your keystrokes, at a tempo you set up beforehand with the tap tempo button. It doesn’t record tempo changes on the fly, or the sound patch you used while recording, or patch changes you might execute while recording. The phrase data is not transmitted to the MIDI Out port, but the clock data can be.

RECORDING NOVEMBER 2010

Recording - November 2010

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