Be thankful that the acoustic piano has always been too heavy to carry to most gigs and too expensive for most schools to fill classrooms with. Otherwise, the incentive to develop three of the most recognizable and soulful keyboards ever — the Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, and the Hohner Clavinet — might never have reached the tipping point. The unique sound of each is as popular today as ever, and original units in good condition have skyrocketed in value. What makes these keyboards sound so great, and what exactly is going on inside each that the software versions on pages 28–42 are trying to emulate? Keyboard wants you to know.
Let’s start out with the key feature of all three: they’re electro-mechanical. The mechanical aspect is a legacy of the acoustic piano. In each keyboard, hammers strike vibrating objects: tines in the Rhodes, reeds in the Wurlitzer, and strings in the Clavinet. The “electro” aspect is that pickups, much like those on an electric guitar, are what translate that vibration into voltage that eventually moves a speaker. From here, the three keyboards diverge in important ways.
THE RHODES
“Rhodes” is almost synonymous with “electric piano.” Harold Rhodes’ first invention was the Xylette, a laptop piano made for injured Army Air Corps servicemen to play while recovering. The Rhodes pianos we’re familiar with today grew out of Mr. Rhodes meeting Leo Fender. In 1959, the two released a prototype of the Fender Rhodes Piano Bass, a keyboard bass made famous by Ray Manzarek of the Doors.
In 1965, CBS bought Fender and began producing Rhodes electric pianos. Beginning with the “sparkletop” (Mark 0), the line evolved through the Mark I (1970), Mark II (1979), and finally the Mark V (1984), which were the last Rhodes pianos of that era. For a time in the ’80s, Roland owned the name and put it on some keyboards, but these were digital, not electro-mechanical. Though Mr. Rhodes passed away in 2000, the company that bears his name is back with a new electro-mechanical piano: the Rhodes Mark 7. Based on the rare Mark V, prototypes debuted at this year’s winter NAMM show (see our Mar. ’07 issue), and full production is planned for early next year. If you’ve always wanted a real Rhodes, but didn’t want to hunt for a used one and refurbish it, 2008 could be your year!
How does a Rhodes make its sound? See Figure 1 on page 27: When you play a key, the hammers strike tines: thin metal rods, each of which attaches to a tone bar that extends above it. This amount to a lopsided tuning fork, with the tine providing more of the bell-like tone, and the tone bar ringing out the fuller, fundamental tone. You tune a Rhodes by sliding a small spring that’s wrapped around each tine. The closer it is to the free end, the more its weight slows the vibration, so the lower the pitch.
Each tine faces its own pickup, and the tone bar is affixed to the harp with two metal screws threaded through springs, which you can adjust to vary how “on-axis” a tine points at its pickup. Relatively off-axis settings produce a fuller, mellower tone; the other extreme is when an imaginary straight line goes through the centers of the tine shaft and pickup — this produces a more nasal sound with less low end. The short solo on Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Shining Star” is a good example of a sharper Rhodes tone; “I Can’t Tell You Why” by the Eagles is one tune that shows off the softer side.
Loosen the small screw on the top of each pickup to adjust the overall distance between pickup and tine. The shorter the distance, the louder the note. You’ll know it’s too close if it starts making clicking noises against the tine.
THE WURLITZER
The Wurlitzer is sometimes confused with the Rhodes by casual listeners. In fact, the Wurly’s tone is more reedy — this isn’t a perfect analogy, but think of a percussive clarinet, as opposed to the Rhodes’ more flute-like tone. Though the company called it an “electronic piano,” today we’d use that term to refer to keyboards that generate sound via oscillators or samples, while an “electric piano” has electro-mechanical innards.
The Wurly’s action is the most complex of our three legends (see Figure 2 on page 27); it’s essentially a scaled-down grand piano action in which felt hammers strike flat metal “reeds.” (Usually, a reed instrument is one in which airflow vibrates the reeds, not hammers.) The sustain pedal attached via a flexible metal cable underneath.
Where the Rhodes uses simple magnetic pickups like an electric guitar, the Wurly has active pickups that require current — unlike a Rhodes, you need to plug a Wurly into AC power to get sound. Tuning is an ungainly process in which you drip solder on the end of the reed, then file it off. The more solder, the lower the pitch. As delicate a task as soldering is on a small part, the bigger problems are the metal filing dust that can get into the circuits, and physical stress that makes the reed more apt to break during playing. Wurlies don’t fall out of tune often — if one does, putting things right is best left to an experienced service tech.
The first Wurlies were made in the ’50s, and once Ray Charles used one on his hit “What’d I Say,” their place in pop music was enshrined. The models most commonly thought of when someone says “Wurly” or plays a Supertramp song are the 200 and 200A, the last of which rolled off the line in 1982.
THE CLAVINET
The Hohner company still makes reed instruments such as harmonicas and accordions; alas, they no longer produce their classic electro-mechanical keyboards. The most famous and funky of these — perhaos due to Stevie Wonder’s iconic hit “Superstition” more than anything else — is the Clavinet. Though that song used a model C, the D6 (released in 1971) became the most popular model due to the addition of four filter/EQ switches that gave the player extended tone control.
The Clav had something in common with acoustic pianos that the Rhodes and Wurly didn’t: strings. Even so, it’s never been called an electric piano. Its mechanism is based on the clavichord, which was invented before the piano. It’s also correct enough to think of the Clav as a 60-string electric guitar with a keyboard on it, because the action works a lot like the “hammer-on” guitar technique (see Figure 3 on page 27). Keys sit right above the strings, and on the underside of each key is a straight hammer with a rubber tip, officially called a “tangent.” Pressing a key drives the string into an “anvil,” a pedestal that acts like a fret. There’s no sustain pedal — hold keys down, and you get sustain. Release them, and the sound is muted by a run of ordinary fabric-store yarn that weaves through all the strings several times, behind the anvil. Tuning is very easy, with slotted tuning screws for each string located right behind the front rail of the keyboard. The Clav has two pickups towards the right side of the harp — one above the strings and one below. The clavinet requires external power or a 9V battery, and since original power adaptors are rare, vintage Clav owners usually use the latter.
There are tons of other variables that affect all three instruments’ tones, from a particular unit’s model or year to what sort of amp and effects you use. Having covered the essential mechanics, though, let’s see how the latest software does at emulating three of the most wanted sounds on the planet.
HOST-SPECIFIC VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS
Of the 19 virtual instruments dedicated to Rhodes, Wurly, and Clav sounds you’ll read about in the following reviews, the three shown in this section run only with particular host software. If you don’t already have Digidesign Pro Tools or Apple Logic Pro, then your initial investment will be higher than with the other instruments in this roundup.
Digidesign Velvet
Apple EVP88
Apple EVD6
CROSS-PLATFORM VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS
What if you want great electric piano or Clav sounds, regardless of whether you’re a Mac or PC musician, and you don’t necessarily use Pro Tools or Logic? Several front-runners emerge: one based entirely on physical modeling, the others on samples.
Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard EP-3
Native Instruments Elektrik Piano
Sonivox DVI Suitcase, DVI Wurlitzer, and DVI Clavinet
SAMPLE LIBRARIES
A lot of musicians have trained their favorite software sampler to jump through hoops, so they prefer to stick with it for their virtual sounds. If that’s you, here are the libraries that stand out from the crowd.
Propellerhead Electromechanical 2.O
Scarbee Keyboard Gold Bundle
Sampletekk Tubed Keys Mk I 73 And Tubed Wurli
M-Audio Premium Electric Pianos And Premium Vintage Keyboards
FREE PLUG-INS
If free plug-ins get much better than this, our favorite commercial developers are going to have to start offering no-points home refinancing with every product registration.
Mr. Ray 73 and Mr. Tramp
MDA ePiano
Big Tick Ticky Clav
MYTHS, FACTS, AND LATE-BREAKING NEWS
New tines for your old Rhodes, a killer SoundFont by a Keyboard online forum member, and three myths to beware. Here’s the stuff we couldn’t bear to leave out, but almost didn’t fit in.
MYTHS AND FACTS
When it comes to vintage keyboards, misinformation is plentiful. Whether you play the genuine article or software emulations, here are three whoppers not to fall for.
MYTH: The Clavinet has a distinctive key-release sound because it’s a plucked instrument, and good emulations put this sound in your face.
FACT: Harpsichords pluck their strings, but Clavs don’t. The Clav’s keys drive the strings straight down, as shown on page 27. Strings eventually wear grooves in the hammer tips, in which they stick when you press a key. Let up, and you hear the vibration of the string becoming unstuck. When it gets too loud, it’s time to replace your tips with new ones, as shown above. If your Clav sample or plug-in simulates key-off vibration, keep it to a minimum, unless you need to imitate a beat-up instrument.
MYTH: The Dyno-My-Piano modification to the Rhodes produced a more bell-like sound by replacing the stock rubber hammer tips with wooden ones.
FACT: Dyno-My-Piano was the brainchild of Chuck Monte, who started the company in 1974 to optimize the Rhodes and other electro-mechanical keyboards for pro use. Their most famous hot-rod job made the Rhodes sound more bell-like, but not because of harder hammer tips. “We never put hard tips in a Rhodes from top to bottom,” says Chuck. The tone was a factor of moving the pickups close to the tines, using the tone bar adjustment screws to accent the overtones (see “Inside the Rhodes” on page 27), and installing a custom preamp that had a high-quality EQ circuit.
MYTH: When recording keyboards, stereo is always better than mono.
FACT: Except for Suitcase models of the Rhodes, which included a stereo tremolo amp that connected via a special cable to the piano that sat atop it, the real instruments all had mono output. Stereo would have been a factor of whatever effects a player ran them through. So even though some plug-ins have a stereo “spread” or “intensity” control that’s upstream of any built-in effects, you should set it to minimum if you want your EP or Clav track to sit in the mix authentically. Instead, let stereo happen as a result of bringing in just the right effects for the sound you’re after.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS
As we were about to go to press, we learned that Learjeff, a prolific contributor to the Keyboard Corner online forum (forums.musicplayer.com), created a SoundFont of his 1977 Rhodes Stage Mk I. It’s available for free at www.learjeff.net. Because SoundFont was originally a sample format for use in consumer-grade computer audio cards such as the Creative Labs SoundBlaster, many pro musicians tend to associate it with dorky video game sounds. Time to do some rethinking, because Learjeff’s work has produced one gorgeous, multi-layered, realistic instrument. Based on over 70MB of samples, it’s highly velocity-responsive, with plenty of tines in the mids and treble, and a low end that can be muted and gentle or honk loudly if you want it to. Most soft samplers, including Reason’s NN-XT, will import today’s incarnation of SoundFonts (SF2 files) without a hitch. Also, plug-in and standalone SoundFont players for Macs and PCs are widely available online.
Also just out of the gate is Syntheway Electrikeys ($35), shown above. It’s a totally modeling-based VST plug-in, available for Windows and Linux, that does Rhodes, Wurly, and Clav sounds, as well as the fabled Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano. Find out more at www.syntheway.com.
REPARO!
These (see image labeled 'Tines' to the right) aren’t magic wands, but for droves of Rhodes enthusiasts, they may as well be. The missing link in restoring vintage Rhodes pianos has always been the tine. For years, service techs have scavenged replacement tines from “parts car” EPs, because no one had figured out how to make new ones that sounded right and lasted. Steve Hayes of Speakeasy Vintage Music, known to our readers for their preamp pedals and Road Box rotary organ speakers, aims to change that. After a multi-year quest that included tracking down wizened engineers from the original Rhodes factory, he’s tooled up and manufacturing new tines. “The early feedback is that in terms of the metallurgy, the durability, and the sustain, we got it right,” he says. Find out more at www.speakeasyvintagemusic.com.