hello, ujiie here. the roland system-1! well, how about it? as you can see, i've got two of them here, which i was just playing for you. yeah, these things, the system-1, they're great! frankly, i was quite surprised! well, first of all, the whole green thing going on here,
very cutting-edge. great! just great. we've got buttons numbered 1 through 8 here. those are the presets. you've got a few sounds to play with. and with the manual button, the sound reflects the current position of the knobs and sliders. what you set is what you get. if you take a look at the layout, here's how it's set up:
oscillators 1 and 2 here. you mix the oscillators via the mixer. there's a sub oscillator here. it's one octave down. you can set it two octaves down though. there's noise too. you control these 4 sources here. mix them together. then there's the pitch envelope here. followed by the filter section here.
cutoff, resonance. envelope too. positive and negative settings available here. and there's key follow, and the adsr. you can set the low pass filter to either 12db or 24db. there's a high pass filter too. and over to the amplifier section. adsr here. attack, decay, sustain, release. and this button here, labelled tone,
emphasizes low frequencies to the left, high frequencies to the right. that's how it works. crusher control here, for distortion. the unique bit-crushed sound. and the effects section with reverb and delay. this knob for delay time. and all the way back to the left, for the lfo section. and below that, volume and portamento.
tempo, for the arpeggiator here. lots of stuff. mono/poly button here. uh this thing is monophonic, plus 4-voice polyphonic. it works in two modes. that's a nice feature. here, listen. it's 4-voice poly now. press the button, the led lights, and now it's mono.
press again, the led blinks, and it's in unison mode. for an even fatter sound. ok, now this here is really neat. usually you have pitch bend and mod wheels here. well, the outer ring of this dial does pitch bend. and for modulation, raise the modulation here, and this button gives mod.
and you've got octave down/up buttons here too. and the hold button, which sustains whatever key you press. it also has a scatter function. it works quite well with the arpeggiator going. neat, huh? you can get some strange effects. it's a nice weapon in the arsenal. ok, something else that's neat about this. remember the tone knob here? hear how the bass got stronger?
turn it to the right... the highs and mids got stronger. for bass sounds, turn it to the left, ok? for leads etc. turn it to the right. that's good. the crusher works like this... that is so awesome! and the reverb? quality! niiiiice! delay.
delay time. it sounds almost like an analog tape delay. quite nice. i like it! ok. let's take a look at the oscillators. let's turn off everything but oscillator 1. ok there we go. the controls for oscillator 1 are over here, you've got the usual sawtooth. that's a nice sawtooth. square wave.
next is triangle. there's a 'color' knob here, apply that to sawtooth... that changes it a bit. that's neat. or with square wave... changing the pulse width? even with the triangle wave... the harmonics subtly change. the really neat part is the next choice.
the supersaw. increasing the color setting adds more and more layers. you've got a number of layers there. supersaw has been around for a while now, but here's something new, the supersquare! this packs a punch! and there's even supertriangle! how powerful is this?
and the range knob here. this is just one oscillator now! and it's this fat?! go ahead and mix in oscillator 2 here. let's go with square for oscillator 2. intense! add the sub oscillator too! the filter is very good too! crank the resonance...
the way it distorts is very nice. this is great! so that's about it, oh the lfo!! man, that's in-tense! and 4-voice polyphonic too. you've got eight presets to mess around with too. changing to a different sound is no problem. or go into manual mode. you've got your own sound.
program it however you want! it's ready for you. ok now another thing about this... that's not all there is to it! i've got it connected to this pc here. got it hooked up to my mac via usb. and what do you know? by just plugging the usb cable in like so, how cool is this, it functions as a usb audio interface.
that's fantastic! and i think you can see here, right here, by default it's 96khz. 24-bit format. 24-bit 96khz mode! from the get go. that's really awesome! uh, i've got cubase running, and what do you see?
wonder what it is? sh-101. ah! there's a real one over here! what's going on here? sh-101. this is the real thing here. i really like this synth! on the pc here we have an emulation. now, the deal is, if you buy a system-1, this here sh-101 on screen comes with it. hehehe, what the heck?
the sound from the emulated sh-101... it's accurate! the sound is the same. same, right? this... they've recreated it. perfectly emulated sh-101, complete with the roland logo. software synth, but hey. look at this here. "plug out"
well what does that mean? usually you call things like this plug-in synthesizers, right? vst, plug-in, what have you. pc-based emulations of the sh-101, etc. that's usually the case. but plug-out means it comes out from the pc, but to where? well, it goes out via usb cable, to this guy here. now this...
wow! zoom in here, ok? this section here is labelled model.system-1 setting now. the system-1 sound is active now. now, if you press the plug-out button here, it takes the model from the pc, and transfers it over in an instant. the current model being the sh-101, so the parameters of that synth, are sent over, bam!
and... just as it is now, in plug-out mode, it's the sh. the model of the sh-101 is now resident inside the system-1. exactly the same!!! the same!!! saaaaaame! this is what i'm talking about! this is serious business here.
so usually, you hook it up, and you use the pc, uh, cubase in this case, call up the sh and use it inside the daw. right? duh! that's how software synths work! they're emulations that run on the computer itself. not here!!! it's a plug-out, it works in reverse! and the model you put in the synth here, even if you unplug the computer, or disconnect the usb,
it's still here inside the synth! the sh-101 right now. hit the plug-out button and there you go. this is an amazing feature! say what you want. and, probably some of you out there noticed already, the sh-101, actually, is a one-vco synth, which uses a very simple system, you can mix sawtooth and square together here, in the source mixer section.
but only one vco, right? as i explained before, the sh here, no, no, the system-1, has two oscillators. two of them. do you see it? the osc 2 section here is experiencing a blackout! and over here on osc 1, the lights are off on the waveform selector knob! so what does that mean?
over here in the mixer section, the knobs for osc 1 and osc 2, serve a different purpose in sh-101 mode, they control the mix level of the saw and square waves. square wave, right? sawtooth, right? sub oscillator here. the knobs control the mix. waveform select has no effect. knobs not lit up have no function.
the whole pitch envelope section: off. and since the sh-101 has no high pass filter, so the high pass filter knob here doesn't do anything. the only exception to the rule... ...is that you can use the effects section. that's what you can do with the plug-out feature. that's what seals the deal for me! and in the future, various plug-out models are going to be released. at least,
that's the vibe i'm catching here. for now, we have the sh-101. buy a system-1 and you get it free, you just download, uh, download it. the sh-101. i wonder what synths they'll release as plug-outs. really something to look forward to! the system-1. well, i've got two of them here.
well, i didn't really touch this one over here at all... and do you see what it's doing now? if you leave it alone for a while, it starts up its own little light show. see it? it's beautiful! that's fantastic too. what if you touch it? there, it's back to normal again.
well, what do you think of the system-1? i really didn't think they'd come this far with it. they did a great job with this! this is something that you viewers really need to try out at a store near you. it's so good, really, you'll fall in love with it! i wonder.... this is the system-1, so... will a system-2 and 3 be coming out in the future? maybe i expect too much, haha!
the system-1!!! translation & captions by: swcreativejapan.
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