The oldest, the grand-daddy of all virtual Rhodes is the Lounge Lizard from Applied Acoustics. Here’s my top 5 software recreations of the Rhodes electric piano, in no particular order. But sometimes when a manufacturer focuses on recreating the feel, heart and soul of this classic electric piano – whether Mark I, Mark II, stage or suitcase – magic can happen. And this follows on into software versions – it’s a standard sound. Pretty much every digital synth, keyboard workstation and sampler will have some kind of Rhodes electric piano going on. The classic tremolo of course, the phaser, chorus, wah and a delay are always popular. But it’s not just the physical glockenspiel-like vibration it’s the tonebar that picks up the sound and the preamp and amplification that give it the grit and variation that we’ve come to love. Hammers hitting strips of metal called “Tines” like a sideways vibraphone. There’s something in the way the sound is created. The most iconic performance for me is Ray Charles playing Shake a Tail-feather in the The Blues Brothers movie.
Riders on the Storm by The Doors, Get Back by the Beatles, I’m Not in Love by 10cc and then much of Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder’s music from the 1970’s. Most of my experience of course comes through records it was used on. I have played one and as I recall the keyboard action was just horrible – really heavy to my soft synth hands – but the sound was sublime.
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