Rhodes piano how does it work

Futuristic rounded plastic design in a variety of colors, two big steel legs, a mini-amp, a built-in metronome and a teacher's attention indicator make it a very desirable collectors item. In the vibrato becomes stereo, and output is increased to 2 x 50W. At the same time, the Wurlitzer Electric Piano Model replaces the Model and straightens out a few tuning problems associated with the Wurlitzer.

In you can get the Fender Rhodes Now you can also choose between the classic Suitcase or the new Stage model, which, stripped of the built-in amp and speakers, makes it half the weight and size, not to mention less costly than its big brother. This is a brilliant move, and probably accelerates the now increasing sales even more. Every fifth piano that is sold is an CBS had their doubts, but Rhodes convinced them to do the 88, and they even get an order for a key version from Michel Legrand!!!

The Rhodes Mark I is equipped with new tines with improved durability, and in the following year come the Neoprene Tips The old action with felt hammers, just like ordinary pianos, loses clarity and sustain when the tine wears a groove in the felt. Now you get a little rubber-like cushion at the top of the hammer size 1 x 1 cm. Each change is preceded by long and endless experiments and comparisons.

This time the key to evenness is to have five different hardnesses, so the bass tips are soft and the treble ones are the hardest.

In the tone bar is changed. The new one is a twisted, flat steel bar that is lighter and has better output. Harold Rhodes has been concerned about the old iron bars' overtones and wants the pianos to sound clean. Next year the Suitcase is provided with an effects loop using pedals required customizing before. Also introduced for Stage model owners is the optional active stereo tremolo preamp, which replaces the Stage model's passive one and comes with two Satellite speakers, each powered with a W amp.

No changes are made other than the one on the nameplate. A lot of people I talk to believe the "Fender Rhodes" to be worth more than the just "Rhodes", but the name is the only difference. In the all-plastic hammers show up, due to a desire to improve the action. These hammers are lighter, and my second Rhodes, a '78, was wonderfully fast and even to play. According to spare parts lists I have, the hammer change coincided with making the 50,th piano at least, all pianos from after the switch have serial numbers from No.

For several reasons, it's wise not to mix some of the spare parts from the two different editions. In the Suitcase gets a bigger power amp and speakers, plus the look is changed: black speaker cloth and slider controls on the front panel. The Super Satellite speakers are replaced by the Janus I system, featuring bigger speakers in stereo with more power 2 x 50W each.

Around , an outsider by the name of Chuck Monte shows up in Rhodes history. His company is called Dyno-My-Piano, and in ads he announces one gadget after the other: preamps, splits, shielding kits, etc. Top of the line is the Dyno-My-Pedal. You had to send your piano to Mr. Monte, and after some magic it came back with no wrinkles and bigger breasts The most obvious change he makes, though, is cutting the lid so you can more easily stack other keyboards on top of your Rhodes.

In the Rhodes 54 provides a solution for keyboardists' increasing weight and space problem. The 54 is much smaller and lighter to fit in big keyboard rigs. He loved the vibrato effect built into early suitcase models, and the different modifications and effects he used — including the Maestro Echoplex — are still in use today.

For many, his Rhodes sound is definitive of the instrument, but his modifications have inspired experimentation rather than emulation — and that was the idea.

The Rhodes is meant to open up the sound around it, so that the person playing it is not just learning the instrument but learning how that instrument works within the greater context of music. That was how Harold Rhodes intended it to be used, and its design requires a unique touch from the person playing it because of the way sound travels from the inside to the ear. The Rhodes is housed in a plywood case covered in a flexible vinyl material known as Tolex.

Its metal legs are stored inside of the case in an interior compartment, which are removed and screwed into the bottom of the piano. There is also a sustain pedal stored in the case, which extends down to the floor in much the same way as pedals on a piano, and the sound from within comes from hammers striking electric tines.

You hear the texture of the keys and feel the way the sound determines the space between movements. The Rhodes demands you let it ring out. Like the piano, the Rhodes has 88 keys though there are 73 key models as well , and it responds the most like a piano of anything else out there.

How do you fill out the harmonies? Because the overtone series of the instrument, it changes that. They all have their own tone and they all have their own sound. Each individual Rhodes I feel like is its own person, its own personality. I feel like the Rhodes — if you just play it, you can hear all those tones.

You can see them going. As a pianist, you could never travel with your piano. But you could travel with your Fender Rhodes. Though the Rhodes piano will forever be known as the Fender Rhodes, the Fender name was actually stripped from it in Many more versions were in production over the course of the s, including a series of third-party, custom-modified pianos starting in called Dyno-My-Rhodes.

The output signal of a Fender Rhodes is weak, as in an electric guitar, and requires pre-amplification. Choosing the adequate guitar amplifier for the Fender Rhodes should be a decision made to satisfy a number of requirements derived from the particular qualities of this instrument. First, the amplifier should be capable to reproduce a wider frequency range of an keyboard instrument; most guitar amplifiers will lack low and high-end response.

Lebar Second, guitar amplifiers add harmonic distortion to the incoming signal, particularly when volume is increased. Finally, amplifiers such as the Fender Twin Reverb with Vibrato effect can recreate an effect similar to the Suitcase model. Suitcase models were built with three amplification systems between and The Rhodes piano used for this instrument research assignment is a Peterson 80 Watt system, which consists of two Solid State 40 Watt amplifiers working with germanium power transistors.

The piano is mounted on a cabinet with four 32 ohms, inch Eminence speakers, each pair located at the front and the back of the cabinet. This cabinet serves as the base of the keyboard and incorporates the sustain pedal mechanism. The 80W Suitcase amplifiers employ interstage phase-inverting transformers to couple the driver power stage to the output transistors, thus preventing DC turn-on transients from striking the output stage and the speakers.

This effect became Stereophonic when Fender designed it, after the one found on Fender Twin guitar amplifiers. Basically, the amplifier switches a low frequency signal between each pair of speakers of the Suitcase cabinet Left to Right in a ping-pong type, creating a difference of amplitude between both. Opstad It would be thanks to Miles Davis that the Rhodes piano would have its deepest influence on modern music.

Three simultaneous Rhodes pianos were recorded and blended, creating experimental sounds with new and distorted timbres.

The pianos used for this session featured wooden piano hammers and un-tampered Ray-Mac tines fig. The combination of these two elements produced a strident, bell-like sound which pioneered Rhodes recordings. When speaking in conversation about this album, Dr. James Piekarsky from Middle Tennessee State University explained how later on Chick Corea would develop his own Rhodes sound by removing the hammer felt tip, thus allowing the hammer to strike the tine directly.

This gave his Rhodes a percussive and striking sound, noticeable in all of his jazz recordings between and Corea would also position the tines very close to the pickups, almost on top of them. This would overdrive the amount of signal coming into the pickup and increase the second harmonic spectra, as described by Shear and Wright.

Chick Corea would also process the output of his Fender Rhodes using a ring modulator guitar pedal called Moogerfooger. This effect modulates a fixed-frequency oscillator and outputs the sum and the difference of its frequencies. The result is a signal enhanced with partials and harmonics, suitable for creating bell-like sounds similar to those of a percussion instrument. Research Explaining Recording Techniques:. Limiting the recorded signal with fast attack and high ratio can easily solve such problems.

Fast transients can be controlled easily, thus gaining dynamic range for boosting the output signal and raising the level of the natural decay. See fig. On the other hand, a metallic timbre is generated when playing keys one octave above the C-5 and up. This makes the Rhodes recording process complicated and introduces special attention when mixing it with other instruments, as Wadhams adds in an article published by Downbeat Magazine in While this gives the instrument its pure, bell- like sound, it means that right-hand chords are clusters of midrange sine waives with lots of sustain.

Sine-clusters can cause beating between notes, sometimes in harmonic overtones intermodulation distortion … Musically, the midrange clusters tend to crowd- out the audibility of other instruments playing these same notes.

As a solution for this problem, Wadhams suggests attenuating the frequency range of the signal from the DI box around the middle C Hz by 4 to 6 dB and smoothly increase the range between 5 to 6 kHz. Wadhams The recording techniques applied for this particular instrument research were aimed at accomplishing the best-recorded sound of the cabinet of a Fender Rhodes Suitcase piano. This decision was made based on the fact that standard recording approaches found in scholarly texts, including Mr.

Particular attention for this research was given in placing microphones in different positions away from the cabinet that would capture how tone quality 1 changes as microphone placement varies in distance and angle from the speaker such as shown in Figs.

For this matter, close microphone placements and combinations used for recording guitar amplifiers were chosen e. Different types of microphones and transducers were employed at the recording location. Additionally, this recording session aimed at exploring how the microphones captured the Vibrato effect in the cabinet. Many DAWs nowadays feature virtual instruments that simulate the classic Rhodes Vibrato sound by using stereo auto-panning processors, where the speed of the panner will be adjusted manually to work with the tempo of the song.

Gibson, Statement of Learning:. The Suitcase Piano used for the recording was not at its best condition, which altered the overall tonal quality and timbre of the instrument. Unfortunately, this was the only Fender Rhodes Suitcase piano available at the time for this research. As seen on figures 11 and 12, tines are not consecutively aligned in height and distance with the pickups throughout the harp of the piano. This radically affects the way each note sounds, as noted previously.

Gain and timbre varied notably per key after listening through the recordings. Unevenness between the heights of some hammer heads along with missing hammer tips Figure 13 also affected the tone produced when striking such keys.

Some keys had the characteristic bell-like sound, while the keys with no hammer head sounded clunky and dampened.