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.