The Sound Board

Softube's Model 82, a fine recreation of the Roland SH-101 (named by Fact Magazine as one of the 14 most important synths in history), is on sale between May 8th and May14th and costs, during that period, only $29. A bargain. The normal price is $99.




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I have no experience with he SH-101. Is there a band or prominent song that featured it back in the day?

Lawrence wrote: ↑May 09, 2025 9:37 pm (...) Is there a band or prominent song that featured it back in the day?

Where to begin? And where to end? The SH-101 — famously not a commercial success at first for Roland, even considered a complete failure — was picked up by the dance producers of the late 80's an quickly became pretty much omnipresent in 80's > 90's house/trance/techno music. After that , it was picked up by artists such as Boards Of Canada (the band often credited with the rise of the SH-101 beyond EDM), Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Massive Attack, The Knife, D.A.F., Portishead, Ozric Tentacles, the list goes on and on.
SH-101 connaisseurs also insist that it can be heard on various Prince and Madonna albums.

Maybe the most famous song that uses the SH-101 is "Sweet Dreams" by Eurythmics, though you have to listen very closely to hear it as most of its parts were overdubbed and/or combined with an Oberheim OB-X. Dave Stewart: “The drum computer was triggering a sequence into the Roland SH‑101 that sounded powerful, and the Oberheim was more of a soft string sound that we managed to cut off so it made it more attacking. I think it was actually a preset, I don’t think we made the sound. The Roland is playing the original sequence and then Annie was playing in between it. ‘Sweet Dreams’ always confuses keyboard players when they try and play it, because they don’t realise it’s actually two keyboard parts that are playing completely different things.”

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Sweet Dreams is the sort of high visibility song I was thinking of, though I always thought that the main riff was made by an Oberheim (I had an Ob-xa back in the day.) That’s a pretty good selling point. I’ve been getting a similar sound from Zebra on some recent tracks.

I’m going to go back and listen to the song and the demos again.

My first two synths, in my TASCAM Portastudio days (my late teens - early twenties), were a Roland JX-3P and an SH-101.
Fairly sure that the sonic palette of the Model82 can be more or less provided by plenty of other softsynths, but there's something about the utter simplicity of an SH-101, real or virtual, that's very appealing and inspiring, I find. To this day.
It's the Suftube softsynth I've been using most (even though the others are much more powerful), although there's probably a good amount of fond memories playing a part here too.

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If I recall correctly Nik Kershaw used it in Won’t let the sun go down on me.
The lead sound appears to have been played on a sh-101