Roland SH-1000


The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact synthesizer produced in Japan, and the first synthesizer produced by Roland. 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 its 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.
The synthesizer has 10 simple preset voices combined with a manually editable section which can be manually tweaked around to create new interesting sounds. No user program memory is available. Its effects include white noise generator, portamento, octave transposition, two low frequency oscillators and a random note generator.
Even with a single oscillator, it sounds like there are several thanks to the 8 sub-osc keys. The ninth is the noise.

Notable SH-1000 users