Rhythmic Robot SH POLY KONTAKT [Restored]

KONTAKT | 75.80 MB
ROLAND SH 7 in Kontakt Format. Towards the end of the 1970s, the SH7 was the crowning glory of Roland's massively successful line of SH synths. It featured a duophonic-capable architecture with two fully-fledged oscillators plus a third "organ" oscillator which blended five different frequencies of square wave in with the sound. It had modulation and routing possibilities that put it a close second to a System 100 modular in terms of flexibility.

A resonant low-pass filter came coupled with a high-pass, which gave a lot of scope for different textures. And the whole thing was wrapped up in a gorgeous, hands-on design that made creating sounds a delight. All in all, it should have been a world-beating instrument.

Strangely, perhaps, it wasn't. Its filters were its Achilles' heel: in the late 70s, prog-rock gods wanted thick, chewy, Moog-style ladder filters to handle those classic screaming synth widdles. The SH7's filters sounded thin by comparison, and it fell from favour – especially by comparison with its little brother the SH5, which did have screaming chewy filters and was cheaper too. So the SH7 began to look like a bit of a mis-step by Roland, unless complexity and sound-design were your thing.

But time has a way of changing things. As prog-rock faded, a new breed of musician started to discover the SH7 as something of a closet classic. For electronica, experimental music, and the dance and techno brigades, the SH7's unique tone and extensive sound-shaping capabilities made it a perfect monster of a synth, if you could get your hands on one. At last there was some love for the SH7.
Here at Rhythmic Robot we seriously feel that love. The SH7 is an absolute triumph of a machine: complex, sure, but friendly and rewarding at the same time. It has a voice all of its own, with richness coming from the oscillators rather than the filters, which really serve just to sculpt the sound, rather than define it. Programming it is huge fun. We wanted to create a software version that captured not just those oscillators, but that fun as well... and so the impetus behind SH Poly was born.

SH Poly is, as the name suggests, a polyphonic take on the duophonic SH7, giving you the SH7's guts but letting you play them like a Jupiter. We sampled every oscillator the SH7 has to offer, plus some crafty combinations and variations, so that the base sound palette on offer is extremely broad. Triangle, Square, Pulse and Saw waveforms are joined by Square+, which is built from the "organ" squarewave oscillators, and a "synced saw" wave captured from syncing Osc 1 to Osc 2 on the original. The two oscillator sections can be detuned relative to each other, for instant warmth and richness; but you can also get this by combining, say, Osc 1 Square with Osc 2 Square+, or Osc 1 Saw with Osc 2 Sync Saw, for subtler flavours of depth.

Features:

- Two main oscillators with detune
- Five waves per oscillator; six wave shapes in total; pink and white noise
- Resonant low-pass filter with envelope
- High-pass filter
- Two LFOs routable to pitch, filter cutoff, amplitude
- "Multi-Osc" adds up to eight further, detunable oscillators for astonishingly rich sounds
- "Glitch" randomises the instrument in a musical way, generating random new sounds
- Chorus, Rotary Speaker, modelled Amp Cab and stereo Reverb effects
- Mono or Poly modes, with glide (portamento)