Roland System-1

A second synth went recently through my studio: the Roland System-1 was thought as a lightweight alternative to the Matrix Brute for smaller live gigs. The synth sounds very versatile, has cool crossmodulation features, unusual waveforms and a very nice arpeggiator. Compared to my other synths I missed character, warmth and voices. Actually it’s a monophonic synth, but it has a polyphonic mode in which it’s able to play 4 voices at the same time, but the sound becomes much thinner – somehow strange in a digital synthesizer. Maybe I would have kept it but as we say in Switzerland the better one is the enemy of the good: I sold it to get the money for a really nice, fat and even in polymode nice sounding synth: the DSI Pro 2.