My Rhodes

The most beautiful/amazing/wonderful sound on the planet is that of an actual Rhodes mkI. That is not an opinion. That is fact! Look it up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me. Do it... see if I care.

Anyways, I digress. As you can probably tell, I am kind of a fan of that vintage sound and vibe. Up until this point, I have been using every synth patch and sample I could get my hands on and never really being satisfied with the results. Since I use some sort of electric mechanical sound on every track that I work on, that adds up to a whole lot of disapointment.

So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a look on craigslist to see if I could track down a Rhodes in my price range. To my surprise, I found a good looking Rhodes for pretty cheap and close to where I live. I immediately sent the guy an e-mail to see if I could swing by and take a look at it. He sent a reply saying that he had just sold it that night. Being that close to owning a Rhodes and then losing it, only pushed me to wanting to buy one even more. So, I went to eBay and found another Rhodes that was kind of a "fixer upper" and started bidding on it. After thinking that I finally found my Rhodes, I started to lose the bid and the price was going up more and more. Combined with the shipping costs to get it to me and knowing how much work was going to have to go into it, I was starting to think that maybe I would have to look some more for a Rhodes or just wait until I could afford to spend a little more money on one. My auction was going to end in 2 days and I decided to go back to craigslist to see if someone had posted another Rhodes. To my surprise, there was another Rhodes that looked pretty good. I sent him an e-mail and asked to take a look at it (letting him know that I was also bidding on eBay for a Rhodes so I needed to make a decision quickly). I went over to his house the day that my auction was going to end and finally got to play a real Rhodes for the first time in my life.

It sounded GREAT! It played BAD! Since I was kind of looking forward to working on a Rhodes, so I bought it. It turns out that it is built in 1976 and has all of the original factory parts including the legs and sustain pedal. I've already made some adjustments to the tonebars and tines, but haven't done too much to fix it up. I'm planning on refurbishing the whole thing and looking forward to having a new project to work on. I'll keep you posted on how things go (all of my devoted readers who are eagerly awaiting to hear about what I am up to and doing at all times).