SH-5
"King of the Roland SH line vintage synths"
You may have heard of the Roland SH101 or even the System 100 Series from back in the day. But did you know the Roland SH series was actually much larger, featuring an SH101, SH1, SH-3(A), SH-5, SH-7, SH-09..? And from these the SH-5 is the undisputed Vintage King Synthesizer. The sound is just so powerful!
Why is the SH-5 so special?
The reason that the SH-5 sound so much more weighted, full and heavy than other synthesizers from its SH line and even from its era, is because it features a special filter design choice. The SH-5 has a lowpass filter and a bandpass filter, which in itself isn't so special, but you can route each oscillator (synth voice) into the filter you want and even sequentially use both filters. Combine this with the fact that you can overdrive the circuit by patching the output of the synthesizer back into the filter external input.. and you have yourself a monster.
How we sampled this machine
In the SH-5 Sample Pack you will find 15 Synth Patches that were multisampled (yes, note for note) from an original Roland SH-5 about 2 weeks after it was fully serviced. It was in exquisite condition and all recordings are clean and straight from the machine. Apart from full length notes we've also recorded a few Patches with the original Roland envelopes which are very snappy with great transients.
And what is even better is that we built a FREE Sampler Device, so you can play back the sounds fully polyphonically in my plugin which is based on the open source DecentSampler VST. Therefore, you don't need expensive software like Kontakt to use the synthesizer.
Drum Samples
As a producer and mixing engineer myself I understand, a sample pack is nothing without some good Drum Samples. Therefore we've included over 500 Drum Samples and one-shots in the Sample Pack.
But we took it one step further and resampled some of the original samples into full drum kits. For instance, there is an 808-Style drum kit with almost identical sounds to the original 808 drum machine which I've made by recording and layering sounds from the SH-5. Therefore it has these same Roland-esque transients and envelopes that the 808 has. Samples inside the Drum Kits were treated with various chains containing analog compressors, analog tube saturation, analog EQ and analog exciters, as well a bit of digital magic.
What does SH even mean?
Funnily enough, nobody knows for sure why the Roland synth line was called "SH" in the first place. And a lot of different ideas have surfaced from the word SyntH to the fact that it was one of Roland's first synthesizers with a Sample and Hold function. Some even believe that it comes from the Japanese word for synthesizer. The word シンセサイザー is a garaigo (a loan word from English) and is pronounced 'shin-se-sai-zā' which sounds like SH if shortened...