I recently picked up a GAIA after eyeing one for a while. Money well spent! This is a fantastic little beast that is much more capable than its detractors would have you believe. It's been many years since I found a synth this immediate and for for actually creating new sounds. I can go from an initialized patch to something interesting in minutes. That takes MUCH longer on other machines. My Korg R3 is a nice little VA as well, but editing is nowhere close to how smooth it is on the GAIA. Going from init to useful patch on the R3 is a much longer process.
I also have an old PMA-5 which was Roland's portable touch-screen GS sound module/sequencer. This was well before mobile music machines like we have now. Most synths and sequencers were far from portable when the PMA-5 came out. It still has some nice sounding, velocity-switched samples in that little GS engine. Going back MUCH further I once owned the Roland RS-101 String Ensemble. That was a great sounding early string synth and one of the few polyphonic keyboards that didn't cost the same as a new car.
Anyhow, I've been digging into the SH-01 and I'm amazed how capable it really is. No wonder Roland still makes this thing. Is it perfect, nope. No synth is. I wish the GM sounds could be accessed from the keyboard. I wish the two D-Beam sounds could be assigned to other sounds as well. I would wish for other things as well, but for the price you can't beat the SH-01.
I already posted a little trick I found that makes OSC SYNC more useful. I'll probably post some more.
New GAIA owner REALLY LONG time Roland owner. :-)
Forum for SH-01 GAIA
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