The Roland SH-01 GAIA has a Dirty Little Secret
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- Опубликовано: 30 июл 2024
- The Roland SH-01 GAIA is a virtual analog synthesizer that has been sold by Roland since 2010. It's well known as a great-sounding true knob-per-function synth on which many people have used to learn subtractive synthesis.
However, it has a dirty little secret: It's not actually a virtual analog synthesizer. I explain what this means, and demonstrate how we can tell.
My full review on the SH-01 GAIA: • Scott's Synth Stuff Ep...
Roland GAIA SH-01: www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinm...
My keyboard Z stand: amzn.to/3Ix5xuF
Z stand extra tier: amzn.to/3XtVpa6
My keyboard A frames: amzn.to/3YwAPav
My silver keyboard covers: amzn.to/40VySFx
My black keyboard covers: amzn.to/3Gt5oXz
0:00 Intro
2:03 Repeated Test
2:42 Longer Note
3:59 Scale Spectrograph
#Roland #SH01 #GAIA 
Видеоклипы
Had one since launch, took it on the road from gig to gig for a decade or more. Sometimes it's more about the musicians creativity than how the machine works. I've had and played many keyboards and this one will always be one of my favorites. I can get on this thing and make almost any sound I want from scratch in seconds to minutes due to the controls and layout. Criminally underated and misunderstood synthesizer.
100% agree. I can come up with sounds so quickly on it, and I have used mine for live work as well.
Sometimes? It´s ALWAYS about the musician's creativity! But well said. This vintage hype is sick!
3 oscillators with 3 resonant 24db filters each set to self oscillation at different harmonics = 6 drawbar organ.
White noise through tuned resonant 98% self oscillating filter is like a hundred oscillator super sine. Stack 2 layers with one filter tuned an octave higher and you have a massive choir.
White noise through resonant filter 100% self oscillating with fast filter sweep and filter vibrato sounds like a human whistle. Layer 3 with variations in vibrato and swoop speed (filter attack) and it’s like an army of blokes whistling - perfect for 1950s army movie soundtracks.
All these sounds i have never even got close to on a modular system or any other analogue or virtual analogue synth.
It is utterly brilliant for sound design.
YES!!! My favorite VA polysynth of all time. I considered buying a second Gaia when they stopped making them. Why?:
1) No menu, all tactile control, very rare for a digital synth. (until the System8 & Boutiques, otherwise just the JD800 and JP8000)
2) 64 voices for gigantic chord changes. Most synths have 8 or less with tactile controls.
3) Three of everything for each oscillator.
4) VA with a LFO for each oscillator, use a sine wave LFO on pitch and a different rate for each oscillator and you have a slow shifting pitch (drift) blending 3 oscillators.
5) Full sized keys. For keyboard masters.
6) TRUE STEREO! Also very rare for all tactile synth, pan each oscillator in the stereo field. This is so powerful for recording.
All the above features are available on most digital synth workstations, but you have to sound design with a menu...YUK! This synth is very fast to create whatever sound is in your head. The Gaia is the only tactile synth I have that can make huge, HUGE chord changes with long release envelopes, no other synth digital or analog can do this, makes the Gaia a one-of-a-kind in history. The replacement for this synth is interesting, the 60 voice SH-4D.
@scott’s synth stuff, this is by far the best graphic example I’ve ever seen of someone explaining sample mapping, I’ll use this technique when doing a workshop
Roland's website makes no mystery of the PCM-based sound generation, but that's only for the multi-timbral synth; there is also one genuine monotimbral polyphonic virtual analog synth in there. Quoting from their website: "Virtual analog synthesizer sound generator (Number of part: 1) (Oscillator + Filter + Amp + Envelopes + LFO) x 3 PCM sound generator (Number of parts: 15)"
I had one of these. The only budget synth that works great for live use and is a basically knob per function option with a good keybed. I sold it and got a nord lead A1 instead which helped a bunch because the monotimbrality was really holding me back. For what it is I highly recommend it to any beginner that wants to learn synthesis.
@ghost mall Only terrible if you dislike supersaws. You can't get an even half decent supersaw on a 4 voice Minilogue. The Gaia can also make good trance sounds because it has an arp and effects section 10X a moden analog like the Take 5.
@@htechdance
The miniloge xs has grait supersaw using the user engine :) And its a code of virtual waves, not sumples. Other then that, you are right about Dave Smith keyboards using realy poor effects section. 45 years has past since the prophet 5 and they didn't learn how to write a decent effect code 😉
Yeah after all these years it's finally revealed ^^ But you know what? I don't mind. Because the Waveforms of the JD-800 were PCM samples too. And did that in any way tarnish the soundquality of that synth? Nope. The Gaia is one of those synths i NEVER expected to love and enjoy using THIS much. And i dunno why. The 3 Layer synth engine really makes this synth VERY versatile and especially with everything directly accessible with no menu diving. Sure, some buttons and knobs are double functioning but so what? I've been working on some really nice patches for this thing that i plan on sharing and demonstrating in a video at one point. Or asking someone to do it x3 It's insane what you can get out of this horribly under-appreciated synth.
I used to own a Korg poly 6 in the 80s. Loved writing sounds on it.
I was crazy, so I did everything to make it sound like a DX7 :-)
but in the end that got me some pretty cool sounds on the thing back in the day.
.
A few years ago I bought the Gaia just because all the other synths I got over the
years were all digital. I really missed that hands-on thing.
I missed actually programming patches the old fashioned way.
The Gaia is especially good in strings, evolving strings and arpeggio's.
I find, with the Gaia, you find where it shines first and then work on those type of banks.
.
PS: really cool that you found that it's a rompler.
I would have played with this synth for years and just never that found out. :-p
Scott, if you ever get a chance it would be great to have an in-depth from start to finish tutorial on the Gaia. Over the years I've gotten more than a handful of people to purchase the Gaia. They still feel like they only know the very basics. You're one of the best reviewers/teachers on youtube IMO. Can't think of anyone else I'd want to do a full tutorial on the Gaia tbh.
I've already done one: ruclips.net/video/jNbnStNI-n8/видео.html
The dead giveaway is the claimed polyphony of 64 notes. Most virtual analogue synths of its era topped out at 8 notes. Sixty four notes would require some very serious DSP computing power.
So is the System-8 a better, more faithful ACB modeling synth? I'm considering that one.
Scott, great that you said it. I know that it's a sampled synth for long time, but alot of people said that it's VA) People need to know th thruth, especially when Roland releasing a new gaia2, which sound also cheape, or like a casual VST synth
Thrust me most analog synth's sounds also like cheap VST's these days.
Grait video and explantion. Thank you! Yes is it is good sounding synth. The problem is not being a rompmer. The proble is that Roland was lying about it for marketing reasons. And we don't respect lyes 😉
The montage you got in your studio is a superb rompler synth ( aside fm ) and no has problem with that. What we care about, mostly, is the sound and specs.
Thanks for this! I bought a Gaia toward the end of its production run, and the question "Are the oscillators circuits, or samples?" has been argued a lot. Your spectrogram settles that. Meanwhile, I'm still learning Gaia programming. It's hard to find a "knob-per-function" synth that also has a patch library on board.
This is pretty cool my man, definitely got a new subscribe from me.
Thx for this. Something like the Venom is the same idea, a rompler at the heart of it, but they worked harder at making the dsp to affect the basic basic waveforms. Roland's own acb does too a little more down the road, also sample based at the end of chain.
I am wondering how you have 1.08K subs, 1 video on some material with almost no views?
You still wont answer my question(s), seems like you paid quite a lot to get those fake subs.
1) Syncing elements of an algorithm allows identical behavior. The only way different notes would be different is if things (the audible oscillator, any LFOs, etc) are allowed to run freely
2) When combining any number of modulation sources, a longer pattern determined by the ratio of their lengths will emerge. That doesn't mean anything is sampled.
3) Those modulation sources can be tracked to the incoming midi pitches. To explain by way of modular synth gear, this could easily be done with enough voltage controlled LFOs. Your explanation would only hold true when limited to LFOs that can't be scaled to pitch data.
So yeah, the thing does have PCM, but the reasoning on those points doesn't hold up as general statements about synth architectures.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. The reasoning in the video doesn't support the conclusion, even though the conclusion happens to be correct.
But if none of his points add up to the thing using pcm, how do you know it's pcm? What's your reasoning, what would be your method?
Thank you
Roland's synths from that era used to be not that good internally, I got a dead JD-Xi because of using a different power adapter. I hope I could find a way to troubleshoot this issue without replacing some circuit boards :)
And thanks for the video Scott, again it is natural, straight to the point, no heavy editing, no jump cuts & informative.
User error, not Rolands fault. But they usually have a fuse in there. Switch it out and youre synth should be good as new
@@krakapoww Thanks appreciate your input. There's no fuse though, their products from that time tend to burn one of their boards instead.
I Ran one for 10 years of road use. In usb mode you can have your set programed up and ready to go. Battery backup is useful for impromtu jamming at festivals.
I own one of these too, and out of all my synths this is the one where I constantly have this internal dialogue going on in my head about HOW it generates sounds, and whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing. But at the end of the day, like you said at the end, it's still a good-sounding synth, especially for the money, easy to use, versatile, very knobby, and that's what matters. And yeah, I think it sounds good too. I bought a June-60 pedal for it recently, and it's a great combo.
June-60 is a much maligned pedal that for some reason sounds great with my gear.
@@pcuimac Yeah I like it too. I really feel like I get that "Roland" sound when I use it with my GAIA. Sure the GAIA may be playing samples, but in a case like this I'm not going to split hairs. It's nice to have all that polyphony.
The issue for me was that Roland tried to hide the samples - Okay maybe not hide per-se, but certainly didn't highlight it. This of course has been known for awhile, and also was one of the things that I immediately picked up on when it was released. (One of the other reasons was the bizarre mix of features - What??) Worse even is that it's not even multisampled well as you point out, which means the loops get really obvious. Also the aliasing is exposed as you get up in the higher registers, with very obvious foldback on the waveforms. Compare this against the VA engine in the Integra7 and you'll see the I7 sounds much better without doing the samples.
good job. careful walking down the street when the Roland van drives by ...😄
General MIDI provided that specific sound names be at specific MIDI program numbers. To change sounds, you didn't necessarily change MIDI channel, you changed program number. So you might set each MIDI channel to a different instrument (10 and 17 were percussion); to change your lead from one synth sound to another, you'd send a program change message to the channel you were using for leads. There were 128 different sounds (1 was grand piano, 13 marimba, 69 oboe). Conforming GM devices had to support 24+-voice polyphony. Devices like the SoundBlaster supported GM for games and also programs like Cakewalk. :)
There is no Ch17 in MIDI...
Might be a typo...
Technically this isn't a sampler in the traditional sense. A synth that utilizes sampled waveforms regardless of what they are is commonly referred to as a sample playback synth (or rompler if you prefer).
Listen: this is a space shuttle! Well, let's say a 737. Not quite a 737, a Cessna. Ok: it's a bird (maybe a mosquito).
2:48 I ain’t going anywhere until you open this door 🤓🔔🛎️🔔🛎️🔔
I've seen all of your vids several times since I just love the way you explain and present stuff, you should be a teacher, but, no offense at all, I had to laugh a bit when I rewatched your vid on the GAIA review... Your hair has gone through radical phases within short time! 😅 All meant with love, I'm a true fan of your channel think I rewatched your vid on the system8 more than 50 times because I like mine so much even though it's "just" (it's more than that) a boosted up JP8000... Wish they'd make a JP8000 plug out though :)
Not that short a time! That GAIA review video was over three years ago. I just stopped cutting my hair a little over a year ago. :)
And now we wait for the gaia 2 video ;)
Already thinking about what to say. Maybe today...
Blue 101 is awesome
it actually sounds pretty good when you open the filter all the way up and send it through an MOTM-440 module and then an El Capistan delay!
What doesnt sound good through a capistan?
Your immaculate blue SH-101 makes me very, very, verrrrrrrrrrrry jealous! I owned a similar one in the early 2000s that had the modulation grip and sold it to a friend for $500. He in turned sold it to someone else. I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming 'noooooooo' loudly at having sold it. At the prices they fetch now, I simply can't justify buying one outside of the Behringer clone.
I have the mod grip for it as well! I did a restore/upgrade of mine, using the Tubbutec kit: ruclips.net/video/23T7WGZgzJk/видео.html
@@ScottsSynthStuff I meant to mention mine was also blue and in pristine condition.
I'll give that video a watch. If you got yours in the early 2000s in Toronto, it's very possible it's my old one! I originally bought it for $200 in/around 1999.
@@ScottsSynthStuffput that on mine it turbos the sh101 great upgrades.🎉
I really liked that.
Showing the spectrum of a non sampled sound for comparison would have been on a CSI level.
I ruined my ears to a non-hifi * level during the Walkman days and have to see what I’m not hearing.
*
Well we are getting into hair-splitting territory between romplers and wavetable synths. Many wavetable synths employ antialiasing schemes that bandlimit the harmonics that would breach Nyquist. But one method is to have sets of bandlimited wavetables in octave-intervals... you will get the same thing where some of the notes have dropped harmonics below nyquist as a result.
However, the varispeed timbral pattern you mentioned does seem to be a pretty clear giveaway of a rompler... when it comes down to it the only difference is a shorter loop (1 cycle). They are both resampled/interpolated audio buffers.
Wait, so are wavetable synths considered virtual analog synths?
@@dpalaoro They certainly can be! A wavetable makes a pretty great virtual analog oscillator. Take something like a MiniMoog for instance. Most of the waveforms are far from perfect saws, squares, and triangles. They also change shape depending on the frequency/note played. One of the ways to model this is to just have a single cycle wavetable for each octave or so which already captures this change and interpolate between them. This has the added benefit of snubbing the aliasing you get if you were to use the same wavetable across the entire spectrum. There are other more advanced techniques like PolyBLEPS that is similar and also reduces aliasing.
I've also achieved a nearly perfect MiniMoog oscillator just with some carefully tuned HPFs on some "perfect" band-limited standard waveform oscillators. There's more than one way to skin a cat!
I wouldn't go as far as to call a wavetable synth like Serem or Vital a VA synth though, just because it does a lot more than that! That said, I'm pretty confident that DIVA uses wavetables under the hood. But there are a lot of other things that go into it that make it VA... the filters, drift, detuning, feedback, and constraints of the controls they choose to present.
Not my first one i used but my first want that i own now is the moog grandmother also the first one i used was 100% analog
The incredibly slept-on M-audio Venom also uses samples for its waveforms. It's a shame that M-audio cut the budget and let them add more knobs for control. The software makes it incredibly powerful.
Not as much of a fan of the GAIA, but more of a fan of its immediate predecessor, the SH-201. The 201 is, I think, more fun to play around with...but that could just be me. 🙂
I've never tried one...but I'd like to. And they are pretty cheap!
@@ScottsSynthStuff They used to be cheap. I picked mine up about 12 years ago for $300 CDN...now, after a quick look at Reverb, they are going from between $750-$1200!
@@FarrellMcGovern Got one (SH-201) last week for 300 euro in perfect condition.
Interesting. Gaia is a interesting synth. Does the new SH-4d do the same in its emulations?
I didn't know that. I hear it rocks though.
Hi, I’ve never played keyboard or piano but I love synths and always have, could I learn to play using a synth? Would the Gaia or microorganisms be a good beginner synth?
Cheers👍🏻
I don't see why not. You won't be playing the same kind of (piano) music, but the same concepts certainly apply.
Interesting. But if you like the way it sounds, what difference does it make in how it produces sounds?
If a Tree falls?!?! lol
Precisely
Ah, SAMPLED WAVEFORMS, like the Roland SH-32!! That's funny that they did this practice with several different synths. Do you think this was a cost cutting measure? Less R&D to use samples than make an algorthim to generate the waveforms?
Probably because they already had the chips for sample based sound generation, they decided to just put it in. You can do the same tricks with JV/XV synths too, which have the raw samples in ROM and a fairly deep synth engine. If they had done single-cycle and one sample per key it would have had a much better result, so some cost cutting there too.
@@ChrisCebelenski makes sense
I kinda gave up on Roland after I bought the SH-32. Apart from sounding pretty crappy, the user manual is so autistically Byzantine that it's almost a work of comedic genius.
I heard the same about the jp8000 that the oscillators are samples. What about the alpha Juno oscillators? How are they generated?
That's true about the JP8000. I believe the Alpha Juno has discrete DCO's.
Wait, but wasn't the JP8000 also marketed as a virtual analog synth?
I guess it begs to question what qualifies as a virtual synth.
guess since it has a separate filter so it theoretically behaves like an analog synth just like the technos that used high resolution samples for oscillators with digital resonance filters
Cool
Wow...I always thought it was just VA!
All that matters is how it sounds-not HOW it sounds.
That is all that matters BUT Roland should be clear in their sales pitch.
not the same but glad it's in my SH-4d
Fingers crossed that with this being discontinued, Roland will see fit to update the sound engine quality but retain the interface. It is so fast and powerful to copy the entire synth chain into the two adjacent slots and detune them in various ways.
Glad i got mine in 2020 when they were still made and you could get one brand new. Sucks the extra software for preset management and Sequencer editing, is abandoned and was NOT turned into freeware... But at least there's an alternative preset manager out there by a independent programmer.
Interesting vid. I think it would have been more effective had you shown the same waveforms generated from the Juno 106 to see the difference. It's a little difficult to understand what you're showing without seeing what the waveforms would've looked like with a freshly generated wave.
0:44 But the JD-800 isn't virtual analog either. It also uses samples. Why would you say otherwise.
virtual analog and rompler is something different. a virtual analog synth has algorithms embedded into a dsp program to simulate the waveforms. if the waveforms are stored on a rom or ram or even flash its not a virtual analog synthesizer. because its not "virtual" its "static"
I don't see an issue in an Analouge synth generating it's basic waveform out of a digital system.
In my experiments i always do something equivalent. It solves a lot of problems and the synth part still can use analog circuits offering a true analog synthesis with a digital stability.
It's just a verry cheap and conveniant way to provide polyfonic and even multitimbrality (if the analog part can switch that fast)
One could debate to the same with the envelope filter though there you surely will hear the difference and that certainly could not called true analog anymore.
😂😂 Nice job 👍🏾
Wow 6.3K in one day we’ll done
I’ve none for a while that some of Roland’s VA oscillators we’re samples. The digital part of the JDXA was awful real obvious looping for multi samples.
Same for the JD-Xi.
You might find something about JP-8000 in your research.
But bottom line looks like you have an SH-101. Does it mean you gonna ditch the SH01 General Midi junk? :)
Edit: If you want a real VA engine, the Novation Ultranova is really really good! Or a V-Synth! Or System-8! Or King Korg. Got them all and to many. ;)
I mean why did people expect it to be a VA engine? Oh! Roland marketed it as one. That's bad. It's like a Kawai K4 or any other synth from the Nineties. In essence its the Fantom X/G Rompler engine. It just got adapted to the usage as solo synthesizer. It's the same engine as in Jupiter-80, Jupiter-50 and Integra 7.
King Korg is a great example. One really under appreciated marvel too.
if only the JV1080 was as easy to program 😢
It can’t be pure PCM though. It’s much harder to do PWM or sync on a sample than on virtual analog. Couldn’t it be they opted for a somehow lazy approach and made the supersaw with PCM, but the other wave forms in VA?
Could be using Wavetables as the “ VA “ oscillators much like the Roland SH32 , Model Craft 2.0 , Skulpt and I suspect a few other VA’s from the past couple decades .
I actually dont mind romplers, they have their place. This particular synth is now becoming popular in certain circles, particularly psy-trance.
I prefer Ultranova over this thing. Before that I bought the real deal: JP-8000!
I have tested a gaia recently and the truth is that everything that is positive about its control design is also negative about the sound, as a former user of a jp8080, V-synth, this gaia is many steps below in the quality of its sound, It is quite thin, I have not found a synth like the jp8080, in my opinion and saving the performance gap, it sounds even more dynamic than the new Jupiter XM,
So no DSP’s?
Nope. But i think the Access Virus uses DSPs.
Wow. Not even ACB, it's multisampled!
Does it really matter at this point?
I wish you would have done a comparison with an actual virtual analog synth. Showing the same charts,and spectogram, waveforms etc.
You don't have a control subject. How do you make a comparison without one. 😂
Weird, “Do Da sound” 😂
This was my wife's favorite synth BECAUSE of that sound!
With only 2 exceptions it has been a LONG time since Roland made anything remotely interesting. The SE-02 took a lot of internal arm twisting behind the scenes to get done; imagine if they had the brains at the time to give it a full size interface and put it in a decent case with a quality 4 octave keybed? SP404 Mk2 is not my cup of tea, but looks to have made a lot of those for whom it is quite happy. I get that there is a market for the type of kit they make; I am simply not it.
Whats the secret🤔
I had one for 4 hours, many years ago. I just thought it is Roland, it is within my budget and so I took it home. I don't know why but there was something very off putting with the sound and I just felt I was being ripped off by the whole package..long story short, I swapped it for a Roland arranger (that arranger although limited was pretty solid)
It is not a great monosynth, but as a poly with big chords it is a one-of-a-kind. Nothing ever made in history like it.
@@WildernessMusic_GentleSerene I respect ur opinion...but tbh I think it was like a super budget access virus...
This thing is aROMpler?
Seriously?
Those are long samples from a Juno a Jupiter a SH 101 ???
They butchered supersaw horribly in this one. If they would implement supersaw from jp8000 instead this synth would be no brainer for a lot of trance music producers including myself. I can't understand roland decision.
lol, nobody understands their decisions. not even the CEO. 😂
Forbidden knowledge lol
It´s wavetables, isn´t it? PCM samples. PPG did the same. No shame in that.
The old GAIA used PCM samples for its oscillators. The GAIA 2 is a cut-down Zen core.
Nothing you said about this keyboard makes it, in anyway desirable. I truly believe Roland has lost its way just making emulations of real synths, not actual synths. I’ll pass.
@ghost mall The GAIA is literally the worst thing Roland ever made.
So it's a looper 😅
No
its dirty little secret is it sounds bad
If you use it to trigger a VST it can sound great. It's just garbage as an actual sound source.
yeah but then why did you buy a ‘synth’ when any shitty midi key would do
Well if you use a different multi-effect pedal to alter its sound, it can sound pretty fantastic. The Digital Filter of it is crap too and causes way too much clipping but i knew that when i got mine. If you know how to work around these flaws, it can be an amazing synth. Especially for beginners.
The bad name followed this synth since it was released. Roland should relase a real analog Gaia to be back on the game.
I don't think Roland has any interest in doing REAL analog anymore at this point. Seems they are totally done with it.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 they released the se-02 later
IT's obviously still selling because they keep releasing new batches, but it's massively overpriced for what it is.
It's not still selling, because Roland has officially discontinued it.
@@ScottsSynthStuff Damn. I thought this thing was going to go forever. The last batch numbers we saw had 2022 build dates, so that might be the last ones.
The have a few thousand of these warehoused that didn't sell for over 8 years.
@@WarrenPostma Can only assume they batch number them as they leave storage then. We've been using them for education projects for years, and the last one we bought in February had a 2022 date on it.
yeah the Micro Korg still has the longest breath in terms of selling time for over 20 years now. And yes, new Gaias were wayyy toooo overprices. As ALL Roland Gear usually is. Not even kidding, Roland seem to overvalue their gear as if they were made of gold or something. I waited for a better deal when i got mine in 2020. And it still kinda felt a little too much.
I find my SH-01 GAIA to be a huge disappointment. It sounds like trash. The filter is the most dissappointing thing. The effects are trash. The on board controls are not all capable of outputing midi CCs which makes it a mediocre controller. Just play the DIVA VST and throw this guy out.
A rompler isn't a sampler and any digital synthesizer is not virtual analog. On the other hand the Gaia is probably one of the worst synths Roland made. There are free plugins that sound much better. Stay away from this synth and try to give better information to your viewers.