Roland SH-1000

The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact synthesizer produced in Japan. It looks more like a child's toy organ than a commercial synth, with colorful sliders and simple functions, yet it produced very nice bass and lead sounds many pro musicians sought after. Although it has limited capabilities, with 10 simple (and rather boring) preset voices, the SH-1000 can be manually tweaked around to create new interesting sounds, unfortunately there is no user program memory available. Its effects include white and pink noise generators, portamento, octave transposition and a random note generator.