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.
Rhodes Chord F Sus (flat 9)
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
What you hear in this clip is all of the processed noise extracted from 1972 Social Commentary Degraded with a Halftone Pattern pasted together. I ran the lot through a short ping pong delay to give give it some stereo processing. Secondly, I decided to leave this file in its 48kHz 24bit state before rendering the MP3. This way you can tell whether or not you have the latest Flash plugin. I just played it on a computer with an older version of Flash Player 10 and got some horrible crackling in the playback, however, if I play it in QuickTime by clicking the link it sounds fine. If you get the same problem, try upgrading your Flash plugin in the browser to fix it.
Processed Noise from 1972 Dialogue
On December 1, 2008 I posted an article about a playback bug in Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.12.36. At that time I was encoding a majority of my audio clips at 48kHz and 24bit, then compressing the MP3 versions to 192kbps. This caused the audio to playback in the Flash player poorly with considerable amounts of warping and distortion. Since then I have been down-sampling my clips to 44.1kHz and 16bit before creating the MP3 to avoid the issue. Although the fix came out early in February, I think I will continue doing this for the time being, until most readers have had time to upgrade their Flash plugins. If you ever look at archived or random entries, I’d suggested upgrading so you don’t experience the playback problems.
Here is another recently produced example of processing sound with Photoshop via Photosounder. In this instance I applied the Halftone Pattern filter under the Distort sub menu.
With this particular effect I find the sound of the noise in between the phrases of dialogue more interesting than the dialogue itself. It has an odd digital scrambling sort of quality that I can imagine using in a audio project for one reason or another.
1972 Dialogue with Distort Halftone Pattern