Another Rhodes Recording from Nublu

Here’s another example of Rhodes recorded during our set at Nublu. It’s interesting for me to hear these clips unprocessed and without the other instrumentation, not to mention the excessive crowd noise in the room. During the performance, when I record these clips, I’m usually running the Rhodes through various amounts of amp modeling, eq, compression, delay, and sometimes reverb or filtering. There’s often other loops playing while I record as well as live drums, bass and laptop added by Graham and Nils as you can hear in Segment of Recording from Nublu.

More Nublu Rhodes

Rhodes Loop from the Nublu Backline

One of the nice things about playing at Nublu is the fact that they have a Rhodes in their backline. I don’t know very many clubs that do, and most of the time, if they do they are in disrepair. Instruments in backlines suffer a lot of abuse. The Rhodes is not a delicate instrument but with heavy use certain things break. Most commonly the tines. So I went to the club early just to check on the Rhodes and offer to repair it if needed.

In fact, two tines in the upper register were broken, but fortunately Nublu had a “parts” Rhodes in the basement that had both of the broken tines intact. I quickly replaced the tines and made a few other minor adjustments and the vintage keyboard was ready for an evening of music. Here’s a clip that I created while improvising during our second set to give you an idea what shape the Rhodes was in.

Nublu Rhodes Loop

Panopticon Rhodes Loop

This loop of Rhodes electric piano is the basis for the track Panopticon on One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). I played the Rhodes through my Memory Man delay to get a sort of watery quality then captured the recording and looped it for the piece. Here’s one instance of the loop.

Panopticon Rhodes Loop

Ring Modulated Rhodes Line Out of Context

While sorting through dusty clips from live performances I came across an angular Rhodes line that sounded quite odd removed from the context of the original set.

I decided to loop the line to create a forty second phrase. Afterward I ran it through distortion, ring modulation, reverb and delay. I also automated the fine tuning setting on the ring modulator to create a sweeping pitch shift.

Rhodes Line Out of Context

 

Segment of Piano Piece with Rhodes

With help from my father who was visiting recently, I have built a new desk for my studio. The idea I had was to build a desk wide enough to build a keyboard drawer underneath. What I came up with was a simple design using three quarter inch plywood, quarter inch ply for the backing and one by three pine for a brace and attachments for the eighteen inch ball bearing drawer runners. The keyboard is a CME UF7 semi-weighted controller.

It has made a huge difference in the ergonomics of my studio to have this controller readily available without having to have it take up extra space on a stand. Here’s a segment from a piece I wrote soon after putting the studio back together with the new desk. I’m using the CME to control my the grand piano patch on my Yamaha A3000 rack mount sampler. The Rhodes is my 1976 suitcase model that does not leave the studio.

Segment of Piano with Rhodes