image courtesy of Kevin Lightner

The SH-1000 has the distinction of being (according to Roland) the first keyboard synthesizer made in Japan. "It is a weird synth from a time when synth manufacturers were probably trying to figure out the best way to market synths to people outside academia. The SH-1000 thus has many color tabs on the front of it just like Grandma's organ. It even has two little holes drilled in the top so you can put in a little music stand. It's not quite a preset synth though. It does have 10 presets that are not editable other than to add vibrato or tremolo. But it also has tabs for creating your own sounds from scratch. You could select 32' square or ramp, 16' pwm, etc.

To edit the wave form, on the left side of the keyboard (where the chord buttons would be if it were Grandma's organ) are most of the controls for editing. It has an EG [envelope generator] with one slider each for ADSR. Its VCF section has a slider for both "freq" and "cut off". However, they work differently depending on whether or not you've chosen to flip the colored tab on front labeled "ADSR". This is in the section of tabs labeled "Spectrum (V.C.F.)". Other choices are, of course, "growl" and "waw". But there are also knobs for those up where the chord buttons should be. Confused? I'm sure the buying public was, too, and that's why you don't see the SH-1000 around, nobody wanted to figure out this weird system. If you own any other analog synths, you'll be able to figure it out though. It is not that difficult, it's just not as straightforward as looking at an SH-101 for instance. You look at the SH-101 and you can pretty much see the sound goes from left to right and is affected along the way. The SH-1000 isn't so clear. It also has a random note generator (uses the noise as its source), glide (preset), portamento (adjustable) and an octave transposition switch for the keyboard. The SH-1000 external controls are "V.C.F. Cont." and "Glide". The SH-1000 also has white and pink noise and some interesting modulation implementation. ----Robert Schmeltzer