SH101 It's still alive
Finding an old synth, I'd sort of forgotten I had and realising that it still worked.
I remembered the other day that I had an old Roland SH-101 somewhere. (I nearly ended up buying a clone before I remembered). Anyway, it was way back under a bed in the spare room, absolutely covered in dust (BTW the floor in front does usually get spring cleaned, just didn't get to the synths. Must have been there for more than 20 years ! I know remember getting it for about £45 back in 91-92 when 80s Analogue synths were really frowned upon.
After getting the synth out I was appalled at the state I'd let it get into and thought it may not work..... but I gave it a good careful vacuum, brushed it off and then cleaned with a damp cloth. Then I found a suitable power supply. The SH-101 "It's Alive".
The pots were a bit scratchy at first, but this seems to be improving a bit. I will have to take it apart at some point to clean the pots properly. Other than that it seemed to work OK (hopefully it will continue). The keys and sequencer were OK, but I've been controlling it mainly with an Arturia Keystep 37 via the CV and gate inputs.
Added bonus, the SH-101 had two jack sockets on it and a label marked MOD and FILTER. I don't remember it having these !!, but they do seem to work when you connect them up to the CVMOD output of the Keystep.
I plan to try and use it with some of my other modular gear and non-modular synths, such as the Peak.
I was thinking of midi-modding it, but as the keystep can control it, I think I'll leave it the way it is.
Another added bonus. When I was searching for the SH-101 also found a Juno 6, an RX-21 drum machine and a DX9 (sad, thought it was a DX7). I am going to try and mod the DX9s firmware ROM to give it 6-operator status. When I get round to it I'll upload some more videos.
I set up the SH-101 to test it and tried out some of the patches from the original user manual. I made a couple of videos of these patches and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. When I get the time I will do some more patches. But I should really be getting on with some synth design and build at some point !
The video links and some pictures are below.
Hopefully, they are of some interest. Please subscribe to my channel if you can. Thanks.
