Cross the workflow of a Roland groovebox with a sound engine evolved from the company's workstation synths, and what do you get? Meet the SH-4d. It's an unabashedly digital synth with patches and FX that echo some of Roland's best-known instruments of the late '80s and early '90s. But it's covered in knobs, faders, and buttons and packed with onboard sequencing, plus some new sonic twists and turns. And what's missing is just as important—menu diving is kept to a minimum. The SH-4d is all about hands-on play.

Roland's SH-4d is a polyphonic synth with multiple synthesis models and drum parts, plus FX, pattern sequencer and extras. There's no keyboard, but you do have two buttons of push-button octaves, plus 16 dedicated step buttons for sequencing. That covers basic song functions, with a focus on the classic Roland TR-REC workflow from its drum machines and grooveboxes. (That means the ability to punch in nicely quantized patterns and sound tweaks on the grid.) Because it's massively polyphonic, you can build up dense synth patterns and layered drum parts, too.

Most immediately striking about the SH-4d is that it looks and feels nicer than anything from Roland in recent years. The company has done away with blinding, garish neon or red lighting, in favour of muted LEDs and a crisp display. The case has a metal top plate, striking a balance between weight and sturdiness. All the pots are metal underneath, for solid-feeling tweaking.

There are a ton of onboard controls, covering parts, layers, oscillator parameters, filter and amplitude envelopes, and modulation. There's also a basic but serviceable filter with lowpass, highpass, and bandpass modes—and it's available per voice.

The heart of the SH-4d is its various oscillator models, which let you stack up layered polyphonic sounds. That includes the default titular SH-4d four-part mode, a "3d" mode with an extra oscillator for modulation, models based on the oscillator structure of the SH-101 and JUNO-106, and various options for making edgy digital sounds (cross-frequency modulation, ring modulation, wavetable and oscillator sync modes). All in all, you get 11 different modes for building up your voice, which you can then combine into four "parts" plus a fifth rhythm part, all of which you can sequence and play simultaneously.

There are some new ideas here, too. There's a wavetable "drawing" mode that lets you quickly create custom wavetables with the four faders. A chord mode uses the faders to create different harmonic voicings for chords, whether or not your theory knowledge or keyboard chops are up to the task. D-MOTION involves picking up the synth and moving it around for two-axis parameter control. That's obviously a gimmick, but it works reasonably well.

There’s even a creative "visual arpeggiator" with various modes, accessed from the main menu. This uses a combination of the keys, encoders one and two, and displays for bouncing and orbiting sequencers. One is a literal game of Pong, complete with score.

Roland pitches the SH-4d as a cross between vintage analogue and futuristic digital, but its sound sits somewhere in between. Despite the mention of the SH-101 and JUNO-106, these are best described as JUNO and 101 "inspired"—an oscillator interface built on the existing (and more polyphonic) architecture of the SH-4d. If you really want a 101 or JUNO sound, Roland has reproduced their idiosyncrasies and architecture more effectively with its Analog Circuit Behaviour models on the SYSTEM-1/SYSTEM-8 and Boutique range. What the SH-4d does give you is a palette from the company's signature synths of the late '80s and '90s. The onboard synth and FX architecture is really close in structure and character to synths like the JD-800 and JD-990 or XV series, which means everything from beloved trance to ambient and other '90s-era and '00s-era club sounds are onboard here. They're even explicitly labeled as such in many of the presets and onboard waveforms.

Dive into the FX, and you get a bunch of additional options. Some of these are more welcome than others—I'm not sure anyone missed the '90s reverbs, and some of the vintage gear analogue labels are a stretch at best. But you'll find options like the Lo-Fi Compressor (also found in Roland Cloud's Zenology FX) can have a near-magical effect. BOSS-style distortion or flange also are terrific, especially for making techno or EBM. (Roland emphasises this is the latest "high-fidelity" architecture, but that's where the "lo-fi compressor" mode on the master FX comes in handy, as sometimes low fidelity is exactly what you need.)

We haven't had all of these options in a Roland groovebox form before. It opens up some interesting possibilities. Feel like a distinctive Roland piano stab in the pattern? D-50 sounds are onboard. Want to layer some vintage synth samples atop your percussion? And then you want some aggressive ring mod synth line with it? There's nothing stopping you.

The ability to stack up synth layers with nearly limitless polyphony and multiple FX is unique in this price range. It's a bit like having a rack of '90s synths, but in a backpack-ready unit that runs off AA batteries, or can connect with multiple outputs to your computer over just a USB-C cable.

That said, the SH-4d has some rough edges. The sounds can be a bit hit or miss—sometimes it seems like Roland chose material from its back catalogue at random. Hundreds of PCM waveforms are available in the drum parts, but only a small selection on the synth voices. The arrow-key navigation buttons are a bit redundant. There's no ability to auto-save presets (as available on the TR-8S, for instance)—for now, your best bet is to save whole parts at once so you don't lose anything. The new filter's sound is a bit crude, compared to recent AIRA synths. There's also no software editor (yet). All of this seems to itch for a firmware update.

You may also want to consider some other options depending on your needs. From Roland, the TR-8S works better as a drum machine and the SP-404MKII is what you want in terms of a performance sampler. Roland also has other better models of its vintage analogue synths. Arturia, Elektron and Korg have some compelling competitors in this price range with their own unique and arguably more modern personalities.

But for anyone willing to dive into tweaking their own sounds, the SH-4d offers a palette unlike anything else in its class. You can mix brutal sounds on the synth engines with lush, '90s-style pads and drums and sequence the whole thing. For that Roland groovebox workflow with a dizzying array of '90s sounds and FX, the SH-4d delivers a huge amount of value at $649. All this comes in a box that's compact, lightweight, sips power and is easy to programme and play. You couldn't say that in 1989 or 1999—or even 2009. Maybe some things are improving, after all.