Custom Roland Gaia SH-01

With its massive sound, hands-on ease, and affordable price, the GAIA SH-01 is a high-performance value with old-school charm. The triple-stacked engine puts potent virtual analog synthesis under your fingertips, yet the control panel is so fun, friendly, and inviting, even first-timers can create great sounds. The signal flow is simple to grasp, with logically arranged knobs, sliders, and buttons. Hands-on control and fat sound make this little powerhouse a joy for music students, songwriters, session players, and live performers of all styles and skill levels.

Following the , Roland continues its SH-series with the Gaia SH-01. The Gaia is an analog modeling synthesizer that retains the basic traits of previous SH-series synths: hands-on tweaking, user-friendly layout and compact design. You won't find any screens or menus on this synth—so if you're in the market for a hands-on, tactile synthesizer, the Roland Gaia SH-01 is not to be overlooked. There are 64 preset sound patches as well as 64 user patches—a huge improvement over the paltry 32 user patches in the SH-201. Weighing in at less than 10 pounds and able to run on battery power, the Gaia is a compact sound designing tool worthy of stage and studio.

The Gaia SH-01 features three oscillators, each with seven different waveforms (saw, square, pulse, triangle, sine, noise and super saw). Each of the seven waveforms have three variations, so it's almost like having 21 waveforms to choose from…per oscillator! Course tuning, fine tuning, oscillator sync and ring modulation controls, and a two-part (attack/decay) envelope generator complete the oscillator section. The filter section has all your basic controls (cutoff, resonance, a dedicated ADSR envelope generator) but also allows you to choose between low-pass, hi-pass, band-pass, or peaking filters. You can also bypass the filter entirely. The amp section controls the volume of the selected oscillator and has your standard ADSR envelope generator. The Gaia essentially offers three LFOs at your disposal (with controls for rate, tempo sync, delay time) that can be routed to any combination of the oscillator, filter or amp.

What makes the Gaia SH-01 stand out, is that although there is physically one oscillator, one filter, one amp and one LFO, you actually have three of each that are virtually layered over one another. In other words, this synth can sound huge! Many synthesizers have any number of oscillators that mix down before going to the filter and amp, but each Gaia oscillator has its own filter, amp and LFO, allowing for some very interesting patches. Furthermore, there is a dedicated master effects section featuring distortion, fuzz, bit crusher, flanger, phaser, pitch shifter, delay, panning delay, reverb and low boost. Each effect is highly tweak-able and really helps bring its sounds to life.