Repairing the Rhodes

Acquiring a Rhodes piano (not mine, but I desperately wanted it to work to record) gave me the opportunity recently to do something I've kind of had on my mind for a few years now.

I wanted to fix it. The last time I seriously used it, I had to be tactical about the chord inversions I used to lay down the grooves, as some of the keys didn't sound.

This is no way to play a musical instrument, of course, and so I was driven to find out what the problem was and work out how to fix it.

I knew that the mechanism itself was fine, because lifting the lid revealed hammers which were mobile and smooth, hitting the tines squarely and firmly. So, the problem had to be either with the tines (the metal rods which vibrate when struck by the hammers and whose motion is converted into an acoustic signal by pickups) or with the pickups themselves.

Moving a tine assembly to a note which did not work revealed that the tine didn't work in this position, thereby proving that the pickup was to blame and not the tine.

Fitting them was a little tricky, but I now have a Rhodes with the main part of the scale perfectly intact. There are a few keys which still don't work but I never really heard the top octave or so of a Rhodes being skilfully played before, so I've left them alone. I have spare pickups if I ever decide to use these notes.

Of course, this is just one part of the process of getting everything sorted out properly. Pickups in place, I now wanted to 'voice' it, this being the process of getting the notes to sound the way I wanted them to.

You may know the closing bars of Donald Fagen's 'New Frontier' from his 1981 album 'Nightfly'. If you haven't heard it, buy it. It is some of the best produced and played Rhodes piano I've ever heard.

Next on the agenda, new hammer tips for the whole range of keys. I think this is the way to go for that consistent sound as some of the keys sound loads better and it's not down to pickups.

I'm working (gradually) on a music website, but that might be even further away than a well-tuned Rhodes.

But watch this space..!