The second voicing in my series of Rhodes chords is a suspended F chord with a flatted ninth. The flatted ninth might also be referred to as a minor second because I’m playing it right next to the root. You could also call this an A flat thirteen over F. I’m not sure what the most correct way to write this chord is, but the minor second and suspended note (B flat) seem to dominate the harmonic structure.
It’s no secret that I’m a lifelong Rhodes electric piano fanatic. I could come up with a laundry list of reasons why this is the case, but one of the main reasons is how well the instrument responds harmonically. Therefore, I have decided to briefly forgo articles about sound design, processing, and field recording in order to present a few of my favored chord voicings on my suitcase model studio Rhodes.
The first example is a poly chord. It’s basically an E major triad over a D major triad, except I’m playing the D as a tenth with the fifth in the middle in the left hand and the third inversion of an E major triad in the right. You’ll need a wide reach in your left hand to play this voicing. The nice thing about it is the deep, open, and complex sound created by the thirteen and the flat five.
Rhodes Chord D7 (13 flat 5) Poly E over D
Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.
Here’s a short loop from one of our live sets. This clip is used in the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). I applied a little bit of knob turning on a few sends while laying down this segment, which is typical of how I use this clip during performances.
I recently recorded a few passages of clavinet on a piece I’ve been working on for a while. My Hohner E7 is still in disrepair, so I had to rely on a sampled version of the instrument. I processed the sampled version in a similar way to how I would have processed the real thing.
Generally I tend to try new things rather than rely on previous settings and techniques, however, I almost always starts with compression on the clav. This time, I followed the compression with amp modeling, chorus, and reverb. The context is the key to what kind of processing I’ll use on this versatile instrument.