The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact

synthesizer A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...

produced in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, and the first synthesizer produced by

Roland Roland (; ; or ''Rotholandus''; or ''Rolando''; died 15 August 778) was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. The historical Roland was mil ...

. 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 In signal processing, white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. The term is used with this or similar meanings in many scientific and technical disciplines, i ...

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 (white or pink) noise.

Notable SH-1000 users

Jarvis Cocker Jarvis Branson Cocker (born 19 September 1963) is an English musician. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp (band), Pulp, he became a reluctant figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s. Cocker h ...

( Pulp) * BlondieThe 30 Top Instruments and Innovations of Roland’s Ikutaro Kakehashi (1930-2017)
'' Electronic Musician'' *

The Human League The Human League are an English synth-pop band formed in Sheffield in 1977. Initially an experimental electronic music, electronic outfit, the group signed to Virgin Records in 1979 and later attained widespread commercial success with their t ...

* The Band * Fad Gadget *

Giorgio Moroder Giovanni Giorgio Moroder (, ; born 26 April 1940) is an Italian composer and music producer. Dubbed the "Honorific nicknames in popular music, Father of Disco", Moroder is credited with pioneering Euro disco and electronic dance music. His work ...

Imagination Imagination is the production of sensations, feelings and thoughts informing oneself. These experiences can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes ...

: " In the Heat of the Night" (1982), bass instrument * Jethro Tull * Eddie Jobson (with

Roxy Music Roxy Music are an English rock music, rock band formed in 1970 by Bryan Ferry (lead vocals/keyboards/principal songwriter) and Graham Simpson (musician), Graham Simpson (bass). By the time the band recorded their Roxy Music (album), first albu ...

) * Jolley & Swain: ''Backtrackin (1985), bass instrument * Tetsuya Komuro * Omar Rodriguez Lopez * Radio Massacre International * Steve Roach * Barry White: ''Change'' (1982), bass instrument *

Vangelis Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (, ; 29 March 1943 – 17 May 2022), known professionally as Vangelis ( ; , ), was a Greek musician, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He composed ...

* Maksim Dunayevsky *

Cardiacs Cardiacs are an English Rock music, rock band formed in Kingston upon Thames by Tim Smith (Cardiacs), Tim Smith (guitar and lead vocals) and his brother Jim Smith (bassist), Jim (bass, backing vocals) in 1977 under the name Cardiac Arrest. One ...

* Boney M. * Sebastian Hardie (1974)

References

External links

Vintage Synth Explorer's page on the SH-1000

Music with SH-1000
SH-1000 Monophonic synthesizers Analog synthesizers Musical instruments invented in the 1970s {{Electronic-musical-instrument-stub