What is your experience?
Which VST plugins are the best recreation of those synths?
Which VST's have those analog weirdness?

 

There is an official Roland VST, seen some 1/1 comparison online and it seems faithful but it doesnt feel well coded from a user pov

 

SH-101 : Roland's own Sh-101 vst, Tal bassline 101 & D16 Lush 101
MS-20 : Korg's own MS-20 vst, Arturia MS-20, Cherry Audio PS-20

All of the are digital, so no real analog weirdness ;-)

 

Most of the Roland Cloud plugins have a setting for them to run "Optimized", and it is not enabled by default. Even the drum machines would run poorly on my i7 laptop without that option checked. They are nice after that. I like both of the "official" versions of the SH-101 and MS-20, but the Arturia recreation of the Korg is very good.

 

I've tried d16 LuSH-101 many years ago, I remember I've loved it! But not in my arsenal, I don't need it, I've enought virtual synthesizers.

 

I own the original (hardware) SH-101 and frankly speaking the only difference is that it has mono audio, it has a good amount of background noise and some crackles when you move sliders.

Beside that, at times is difficult to duplicate patches with VSTs because they have a different layout and usually expanded features not available in the real synth.

 

i'm not talking about performance, they seem to be light on CPU, but the preset management and GUI can be improved tbh.

 

Common sense would lead me to say the Roland SH-101 plugin and the Korg MS-20 plugin, as both Roland and Korg have official plugin versions of these two synths.

For alternatives though, D16 Group's LuSH-101 is by far the best SH-101 in my view, and the Arturia MS-20 V is probably the best MS-20 alternative. Cherry Audio's PS-20 is also a decent cheap alternative if budget is limited.

 

Back in 2011 my ex-bandmate uses a big ass MS-20, I'm quite familiar with its sound and played with it a bit in the studio but I don't know much about synthesizers back then. I think the Arturia's sound just like it. Not in a detailed manner, it's just how I remembered it. The Korg's version feels smaller somehow.

Encountered a lot of SH-101s but never liked it, not a fan, but if I have to use and choose between VSTis I've played, I'd go for the LuSH-101 because of its features with layers, mixers, fx and stuff.

 

Last edited: May 3, 2023