- In its day, Roland's SH-101 was an immensely popular synth, and it still commands good money secondhand. You'd think it was perfect for soft synth emulation, but Roland have been slow to embrace the format. Thankfully, they haven't been particularly aggressive in preventing other developers from producing software emulations of their famous machines. There have already been a few SH-101 emulations, including TC's Powercore 01 and TAL's BassLine-101, and both stuck to the monosynth design of the original. Poland's D16 Group have already impressed with their recreations of three classic Roland drum machines (Drumazon, Nepheton and Nithonat) and the TB-303 (Phoscyon), so the SH-101, in the form of the LuSH-101, was a logical next step for them.
The original SH-101 had a number of things going for it. The combination of oscillator and filter design could deliver amazingly edgy sounds, great effects and deep bass. The layout and slider controls were easy to programme and easy to perform with. It was also portable (and could be battery powered), so along with a guitar strap and its attachable pitch bend and modulation handle, it epitomised the 1980s keytar in all its questionable glory. Even so, by today's standards a monophonic, monotimbral design with a single oscillator (albeit with three simultaneous waveforms—sawtooth, pulse/square and sub) looks pretty archaic. So D16 essentially approached the LuSH-101 as a new design inspired by the SH-101. I'm not going to list all the differences, but at the most basic level the oscillator section is enhanced to include sync (dubbed HardSync) between the square and saw. D16 also added a choice of noise types (white, pink and brown) and additional sub-oscillator types. But most significant is the SuperSaw option, which multiplies up the sawtooth oscillator and adds detune.
In essence this sort of supersizing continues throughout, as you get two full ADSR envelopes, two LFOs (with extra ramp up and down waveforms) and both a high pass filter and a multimode filter (with linear and more unstable SH-101 modes). Portamento is the same as the SH-101, but there's also a mono mode and selectable polyphonic mode (up to 32 voices, with two voice distribution options). This is then enhanced by a unison option (tune, pan and cutoff), although you can't exceed the 32-voice polyphony limit. Further options include the arpeggio/gater, which features its own pattern browser, and an insert effect with eight options (phaser, chorus, distortion and so on).
I think if they'd left things at that, LuSH-101 would be a pretty solid virtual analogue synth that enhances a classic design. However, these aspects simply form what they call a timbre, which is one layer of an eight-layer multitimbral design. This is handled along the top bar, where you can see eight buttons to enable and mute each layer. You edit by selecting the layer you want, which precipitates a further preset browser at the top-left that handles multilayer patches. Below that are MIDI channel assignment, key range and transpose settings. Layers are then hardwired to LuSH-101's master mixer, another full page accessed via the yellow button on the top bar. This has channels for each layer with level, panning, compressor and three-band EQ, plus three auxiliary busses (reverb, delay and chorus). It's also where you route outputs for multi-output instances. Finally, there's a global modulation matrix (the third main page) where you can link various sources to destination parameters on a layer-by-layer basis.
Much like the SH-101, LuSH-101's interface is easy to understand, and clever use of LED indicators that double as buttons is clear and saves space. Even so, graphics are small, and with no window rescaling, what you see is what you get. Laptop users will be glad the keyboard can be hidden, though I found it odd you had to select this in the settings and relaunch the plug-in. LuSH-101 includes over 1600 presets covering whole synth, single-layer, arpeggiator, reverb and delay settings. Categorisation is sensible (although there's no search option) and spinning through presets is quick. Rather usefully, you can individually lock layers and arpeggios to load parts of other multilayer presets.
Understandably, the presets cover a lot of ground, from fat basses and edgy leads to smooth pads and some excellent sequences and arpeggios. Sonically, LuSH-101 is excellent, particularly when you peel away the effects they've added to the presets. For direct, in-your-face sounds, it's really worth starting from scratch with the default patch. In this bare form, the SH-101 filter option comes into its own, and you can easily achieve piercing edginess.
Even so, the elephant in the room here is the CPU hit once you start increasing the polyphony, adding in unison and building up layers. I tried it on two machines, both with good but not lightening-fast processors, and some of the more complex patches maxed out the systems. Obviously this is frustrating, particularly as it sounds so good. One workaround is to keep a close eye on polyphony and unison settings, or just steer clear of complex multilayered sounds. There is a quality setting in the preferences, but this is limited to just two options, normal and high. A rep for D16 told me they're considering multi-core support but are understandably unwilling to compromise the sound. Other improvements on the horizon include different GUI sizes, additional skins, further modulation destinations, function knobs and RTAS/AAX support.
Overall, though, the LuSH-101 is a worthy synth as it stands. It falls into a new breed of emulations that are getting closer and closer to the character of hardware, and it sounds very fine indeed. The CPU issue is annoying, but stick to one or two layers and allocate polyphony suitably and you should be good to go.
Ratings:
Cost: 5/5
Versatility: 2.5/5
Sound: 5/5
Ease of use: 4/5