Roland has released a lot of synths over the past few years, including revamped Juno and Jupiter lines, its Boutique emulations of vintage gear, the pocket-sized Aira Compact range and lots more besides. In my personal opinion, the SH-4d is the best thing in the company’s current lineup – and it’s down to an absolute bargain price on Amazon this weekend.
Like a lot of Roland’s current crop of hardware instruments the SH-4d makes use of the company’s Zen-Core engine, but its unique design sets it apart from the bulk of the company’s Zen-Core keyboards. The SH-4d is a five-part groovebox, with four polyphonic synth channels and one multi-track drum machine. Its sound engine makes use of a mixture of virtual analog, digital synthesis and sampling in order to offer a spectrum of sounds that range from vintage gear emulations to modern tones and an array of percussive kits.
The poly synth parts make use of 11 varied engine types, ranging from virtual analog to simple FM, a neat chord triggering mode, sample-based synthesis, wavetables and a unique oscillator drawing mode. The drum engine, meanwhile, is deceptively powerful, letting the user layer two samples for each sound and apply pitch envelopes for simple drum synthesis. All of this comes housed in a stylish desktop groovebox with plenty of hands-on control.
It’s a unique and creative machine, and personally I find it very inspiring. Its characteristic design means that it won’t suit everyone – the lack of a keyboard being an obvious downside for some users – but for less than $400 it’s a lot of synth power for the money.
Watch our demo video above to see and hear it in action.
