Archive for Keyboards
Roland SH-1000 Synth – Get Your Analog On!
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The Roland SH-1000 Analog Synthesizer
This was the very first synth I ever owned. It sat right on top of my A-100 Hammond organ (same as a B-3 with the addition of built in speakers).
If you don’t have a vintage hardware synth in your studio, this would bring you hours of audio enjoyment. It is especially good at big, fat basses. It’s also very easy to create all those weird, ethereal analog sounds you’ve heard so often. While the controls are limited, there’s enough to get thousands of different sounds very quickly.
I’ve seen this unit selling for as little $100 on the used market. I would personally pay as much as $300 for one in really good shape. Here’s a full video demo of the Roland SH-1000:
Here’s the factual breakdown on this cool retro synth from Wikipedia:
The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact synthesizer produced in Japan. 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 it’s 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.
Some famous 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
If you pick one of these up, please let me know! I’d love to hear about it and see some pics. 
The Akai X7000 – One Of The Coolest Vintage Sampling Keyboards
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Akai X7000 Keyboard Sampler
This was the first sampling keyboard that I owned, and what a blast it was! I must have sampled everything within ten miles of my house and all my friends and relatives too!
If you can find this vintage piece (street price around $300 – $400) I know you’ll have a lot of fun as well. There are a few things to watch out for though.
It uses an outdated 2.8″ format disk drive that records to Quick Disks. If the drive is broken or wears out it could be very hard to find a replacement. As for finding blank disks, a quick search on Google didn’t turn up much. There were some hardware word processors that used this same disk format so that might give you some leads.
Also, the keyboard itself wasn’t very heavy duty. I’m a hard player and I had to replace the entire keyboard assembly every sixteen months or so.
However, you have to keep in mind that I was gigging and rehearsing five to seven nights per week, so it saw a lot of use and abuse. In your studio environment that probably wouldn’t even be an issue.
Other hardware samplers you might like to look at would be the Ensoniq Mirage and EPS, the Emu Emax and the Roland S10.
The Roland U220 – My Favorite ROMpler
Posted by: | CommentsAh, this is the first rack-mounted sample playback unit I ever owned, and I still have two of them here in the studio today.
The Roland U220 Sound Module
These type of units were known as ROMplers because they came preloaded (in ROM memory) with all the sample libraries it needed to make up its patches. You could also expand some of them with ROM cards that added new samples and new patches. The U220 has two of these slots. (I believe there was a library of about 12 different cards available.)
Some of the sounds are classics that I still use today. Some of my favorites are the piano, the overdriven B3 organ, the muted trumpet, the soprano sax, the smooth tenor sax and the Benny Hill-ish, honky, rock-n-roll tenor sax. Another handy thing was that it had 30-voice polyphony for all these voices.
There were two great playback demos in the U220. Here are both of them for your listening pleasure.
Now, this one has a couple of interesting tidbits I have to point out. First, the bass line is cool and demonstrates the unit’s ability to set different pitch bend values for bending up and bending down. Second, this demo was created by Eric Persing, the genius behind all the Spectrasonics plugins; Omnisphere, Stylus RMX and Trillian (formerly Trilogy). I wish this guy would put out a whole album!
Eric Persing - U Might Be The OneYou can pick up a U220 on the used market for just a couple of hundred bucks these days. It’s well worth a look if you’re thinking about adding to your rack!
My Old Friend, The Roland D50
Posted by: | CommentsMan this was a cool keyboard! It was was first really big, new synth purchase…over $2,000! But, boy did it turn out to be worth it.
Roland D50
Not only did I record with this keyboard, I toured and played live with it for more than a decade without one single failure! Now that’s roadworthiness.
But more importantly, there was the quality of the sound! At the time everyone was raving over the Korg M1, and it was okay. But when I laid my hands on this piece of gear, it was magic to my fingers and my ears. Once I got a hold of many of the top aftermarket patch cards for it, it really took it over the top. Layering it with my Roland U220 was also a scream. Talk about thick!
Here’s a great breakdown on this powerful synth from the Vintage Synth Explorer blog:
The D-50 is an all-time favorite digital synth that’s still just as popular today as when it first came out in ’87. Once Roland’s hottest digital synth, it competed against the Yamaha DX7, and was much easier to use.
By joining 8-bit PCM samples with “LAS” synth-generated sounds, the D-50 is capable of unique and complex sounds. The PCM samples contained the attack transients, while the rest of the sound came from the Linear Arithmatic Synth (LAS) section which sounds very analog, with subtractive-style synthesis and low-pass-resonant filters.
Built-in chorus and (for the first time) digital reverb are also included for giving your sounds space and life! It also has a joystick controller for real-time timbre manipulation. The D-50 was great for new and non-acoustic, percussive, ethereal and beautiful pads & sounds.
The Roland D550 Rack Mount
Both the D-50 and D-550 benefit from the PG-1000 external controller which gives you very plain and simple slider/fader type control of all adjustable parameters of the synth.
The D-50 includes MIDI on all 16 channels but because it is monotimbral you can only use one channel at a time. There is an upgrade which will give the D-50 and its rackmount version a full 16 channels of simultaneous MIDI multitimbral data communication.
This popular synth has been widely used in all forms of music. Eric Clapton, Enya, 808 State, Jean Michel Jarre, Vince Clarke, Apollo 440, Eat Static, LTJ Bukem, Fluke, Information Society, Lab-4, Gary Numan, Rick Wakeman, Kitaro, Rush, Vangelis, Richard Barbieri, Boston and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran are just a few of the many satisfied users.
I’m glad I decided never to sell this important part of my personal music history.
Nine Inexpensive Vintage Synths That Are Actually Decent
Posted by: | CommentsSome hardware synths have become collectors items and have skyrocketed in price. But, there are still some good deals to be had in the second-hand market on a few cool electronic noise makers.
Tom from the Waveformless blog in Seattle, WA put together a nice little blog post detailing some of these “sleeper” synths out there waiting for you.
Here’s the list of what he highlights (I’ve had a few of these in the past. Now I’m sorry I got rid of them!):
- Casio CZ-101 (typically less than $100)
- Ensoniq ESQ-1 (typically $150-$300)
- Moog (Realistic) Concertmate MG-1 (typically $100-$500)
- Oberheim Matrix-6R (typically $150-$350+)
- Roland HS-10/80 (typically $25-$100)
- Roland HS-60 (typically $200+)
- Roland MKS-7 (typically $200+)
- Yamaha CS-01 (typically $150-$250)
- Yamaha TX81Z (typically $50-$85)
Here’s the Moog Realistic Concertmate MG-1 in action:
Do you have a recommendation for additions to this list? Leave a comment!
