Among the highlights of the product releases last week, Roland has a new virtual analog synth (the SH-01) and shoulder keyboard (AX-09) that look friendly and relatively affordable (especially once you account for street price, not list). They have that convergence of certain selling points that I think will make them popular – maybe not with everyone, but with enough people that you may soon be seeing them around. And that makes them worth a little further research.

I got to have a long conversation with Vince LaDuca of Roland US about the new gear, so we could answer some questions readers raised and talk about some of the technical details. Here’s what I came away with following that chat, starting with the SH-01.

GAIA SH-01 Synth

The most important message I got about the SH-01 was that this really does seem to be a new generation of synth from Roland. It’s not directly equivalent to the SH-201; it takes advantages of newer Roland tech in DSP and specifically in power savings. That’s what allows you to unplug the SH-01 and run it on 8 AA batteries for, according to Vince, somewhere around five hours.

Unlike the previous SH-201, too, the SH-01 has a rich set of great-sounding effects. (The effects section was, for me, the real weak point of the 201.)

Architecture: The SH-01’s virtual analog engine is indeed mono-timbral; it’s all on channel 1. You do get three virtual analog tones, though, so you can put together some fairly sophisticated patch designs. (Vince and I couldn’t think of a three-tone Roland synth, ever, but if you know of one, shout it out in comments.

There are some twists, though:

Oddly enough, the SH-01 packs a full-blown General MIDI+ sound chip for GM soundfile playback. (I can’t dream of ever wanting that, but I know there are folks out there who still play SMF files on GM banks.) So, that PCM engine responds on channels 2-16. You probably don’t care, but now you know. And if you’re wondering what that meant when you read the specs, you weren’t hallucinating.

You get two LFOs for each of the three tones. There’s also a separate, assignable LFO for modulation. There are additional modulation options accessible from the front panel, too. For instance, you can adjust panning depth modulation for both LFOs by holding down the shift key.

Between tones 1 + 2, you have the option of ring modulation and oscillator sync. So, combine the three tones and the modulation choices, and you have some pretty rich sonic options on a pretty cheap board – there are certain advantages to virtual analog.

What happens when you switch tones and adjust a knob? A couple of readers asked about this. Let’s imagine you move a parameter knob from three o’ clock to nine o’ clock, then switch from the first tone to the second tone. Once you touch the knob again and move it, it will jump to its new value for the second tone. To me, it’s probably the only reasonable compromise; you want the tactile feedback of knobs, but you wouldn’t want the complexity of waiting for a knob to pick up a value.

The good news, though: you can select multiple tones at once and adjust the parameter on all of them at the same time.

Preset storage: The SH-01 has 64 preset programs, plus 64 user programs onboard. That’s plenty for me, but since some readers asked, if you add a USB key, you get an additional 64 programs, for a total of 128 user programs (or a grand total of 192).