| The Super Site 11th (& 12th) Anniversary Rhodes Restoration Blog |
narrated by James Garfield |
My new friend in its new home!
Getting down to business.
A pickup rail from early 1975...with all new pickups from 2000??!!?!
But then there's the missing tonebar...
And the multi-colored hammers...
And a couple of peculiar looking keys as well...
The Story So Far (12/05/06): I spent the summer moving back to the West Coast after 2 years in Connecticut, this being my third move from one side of the US to the other (and hopefully the last, no offense to my friends & relatives in the Northeast). I had made the decision that my Suitcase 73 was not coming with me this time, since I needed the cash and was able to get a good chunk of it selling the thing to a DJ in Brooklyn who was learning to play the piano. I spent a lot of time rationalizing this decision, originally trying to convince myself that I could find another one on Craig's List when I got back to the Bay Area. When we moved into our new (much smaller) place, the argument was that there wasn't enough room for one with all of the crap I already had in the house. Plus I had installed Roland's SRX-12 Classic EPs board in my XV-5050, which sounds decent in a live setting, and later I picked up the Scarbee K.G.B. collection in hopes of using its excellent electroacoustic keyboard samples on my laptop for home recording. And in the end, I kept trying to remind myself what a pain in the ass it can be to own a Rhodes where the right channel of the amp blows out randomly and the F above middle C never has any sustain even with a new tine and a new hammer tip and a tonebar clip. So I decided that I should just move into the 21st Century and embrace the digitally-modeled future, which is getting brighter every day (although not warmer for some reason...).
So a few weeks back I got to sit down with the father of one of my daughter's friends from school, who happened to be a drummer around my age. We got into the conversations about how we should jam sometime, and inevitably into the whole Rhodes website thing. Which lead to the "Why don't you still have one?" question, which lead to the "I'm not really sure anymore" answer. I ended up looking for one locally and only ran into people who knew what they were selling, i.e. no good deals at all. The one good thing that came of it was that I found a local tech who maintains the Suitcase rented out by the Kuumbwa Jazz Center and other venues around here. He had found a Silvertop that he planned to work on, but he wasn't sure if he would sell it (and I don't blame him). Getting so close to that kind of prize, I started giving up again. After all, HALion for the Intel Mac's will be out in a few months, and the Scarbee K.G.B. will actually run on my laptop. Not that I really want to gig with a laptop, but you do what you have to do.
But then I began to think...how many people in the Rhodes tech business do I know that probably have a spare sitting around that they'd give me a deal on? I knew that John at Major Key had a tiny museum of his own and figured that he could part with one of the more boring (i.e. practical) pianos in his collection. He decided to donate the Major Key shop's "work piano" to me as thanks for the 10 years I've put into this website, which of course was an offer I couldn't refuse. A guy in a van delivered it a few days later, and it was party time. Sorta.
I gigged with an insane bassist last month who had both an upright and a Fender electric of some sort, which lead to the "which model? what year?" kind of questions from other musicians hanging out in the cafe. He said it was a "Franken-Fender", pieced together from different vintages so that it worked. I guess that would make my new piano a "Franken-Rhodes"...not only is it from 1975 (the year when everything was changing), but it has obviously been torn apart and experimented upon several times in its life. A few tines sound and look very new (I'm pretty sure they're new/old stock), a couple are completely dead, and one tine/tonebar assembly is completely missing. There are two keys that were obviously replaced with newer ones (a little too big and way too white), and the plastic parts of the various hammers are three different colors (light yellow, medium brown and dark brown-green). The dampers look like they were redone with the Major Key replacement felt kit, but it's the damper arms themselves that are the problem, twisted all over the place with a few felts flopping over to the side. I think they used their replacement hammer tips as well, but at least one had popped off and was rolling around in the piano. The good news is that the wood/plastic hammers are all in great shape, the key pedestal felts and key bushings don't look too worn, the namerail looks brand new and the pickup rail has been completely refitted with new pickups (John even signed his name next to the date stamp!). Obviously there's absolutely nothing to be complaining about here, but there's obviously a lot of work to be done as well.
Holiday? What holiday?
Over Thanksgiving weekend here in the US, my old friend and co-founder of this site was in California as part of his 3-week trek around the country. Frederik and I have known each other for years now but had never actually met in person, so this was a monumental event for both of us. We spent a good piece of Friday going through the piano to figure out what really needed to be done, with Frederik teaching me his own general techniques for repairing and adjusting the piano. With the new pickup rail, it was obvious that it had been installed and tested (according to John's signature this happened in 2000), but the harp had never been voiced afterward. So some notes were very loud, some too soft, a few not sounding at all. Looking at the key pedestals, a few were new but most were older, and none had the key pedestal modification that improved the action in the late 70's. This explained why the action was so weak. The tonebar screws and grommets had been replaced with ones from the Major Key kit in the upper register and a couple of tonebar clips were added, but the rest of the harp was factory standard. Frederik noticed that a few screws were bent as well, so we headed to the hardware store in search of replacements. We found a couple of boxes of 1-1/2" (40 mm) #8 flat-head wood screws that were the same size and didn't have the threading all the way up to the head, leaving the smooth area that's supposed to be there for the grommets. Between those, a bunch of #6 cup washers and a couple of bottles of super glue, we were ready to get rolling.
In the end, we replaced all of the hammer tips with a set from Major Key, re-mounted the tonebars with the new screws and cup washers, replaced the grommets with Speakeasy's custom set and added the plastic bumps from Vintage Vibe's Miracle Mod kit to the key pedestals (which really did perform a miracle on the piano's terrible action). Afterward, Frederik showed me his own techniques for voicing the harp, which were definitely insightful. The wildest part was listening to the effect of different adjustments and finding that you can get a Wurly sound out of a Rhodes if you're looking for it! What we also found, though, is that the brand new pickup rail has several bad solder joints that need to be solidified, as well as a very ugly set of dampers with felts flopping over and the dampers themselves contorted in bizarre ways. There was still a lot of work to do....
We thought the pedestal felts were ready to go, until I really started looking at those felts...
The Keys And Their Pedestal Felts (12/17/06): I finally got to start working again today, with the key pedestal felts being first on my list. I've currently got the namerail, harp and pickup rail removed, along with all of the keys, so all you see now is the hammers and dampers. Speakeasy is sending me a set of their stainless steel damper combs and the double felt kit, and I'm still waiting for delivery (UPS Ground from PA to CA seems to take about a week and a half, I've noticed). In the meantime I decided to get to work on the keys. The bushings look like they're in decent shape, but most of the pedestal felts were worn and needed replacement. I found that 7 of them had already been replaced by Major Key, which are obviously new when you look at them. I needed to remove the Vintage Vibe bumps from the felts with an exacto knife in order to reuse them, and what was interesting was that the new Major Key felts refused to let go of those plastic bumps. With the old felts it was easy. I'm not sure if they're exactly the right composition, but at this point I definitely have faith in the Major Key felts to do the job.
Once I had the bumps set aside and the gash in my finger from the exacto knife bandaged up, I removed the felts themselves. I had read TJ Combs' advice about using an iron (without steam) as a way to remove them, and it definitely works. I found that on medium heat it only took about 10 sec. to get the glue loose, so the whole procedure didn't take long at all. My next task is to replace the felts for the 66 keys that don't have them, which will involve combining the Major Key felt kit and the Vintage Vibe bumps. Now my question is, will the adhesive under the felt's peel-off strip really be strong enough to stick to the wood for the long run???
The dampers from the underside...click for a closeup of the chaos!
The Day After Christmas (12/26/06): On Friday the Harmonic Clarifier from Major Key showed up with a couple of long tines, and today the package of dampers, felts & bridle straps from Speakeasy arrived, so I've got just about every part I need to overhaul this thing properly. Next on my list are removing the damper bar and ripping out the damper modules, and finishing the key pedestal felt work that's half done right now. My digital camera went in for warranty service today, so there will probably be a gap in my photo documentation here (as of now I've got tons of pics that I haven't added to this page yet!).
Tonight I decided to remove the damper bar and see what's under there. It looks like the damper arms are the originals from 1975, individual arms that somebody numbered 1 to 73 by hand. Since the writing looks on the newer side, I'm assuming the arms were removed at one time in order to replace the bridle straps and/or the damper felts. What's strange, though, is the thick layer of yellowed glue smeared all across the wood where the dampers are screwed in...was this somebody's idea to keep all of the arms aligned??? I guess it did its job, since none of the arms moved at all when I removed each of the screws.
The blessing of Longevity from the mysterious JM. Every Rhodes should have one of these.
As I peeled the arms off with chunks of glue flying everywhere, I found many of the lost paper "o" rings that go on top of the balance rail felts. But the wilder thing was what I found stamped on the wood: a Chinese symbol for "longevity"!!!!! I guess a previous owner or tech knew what kind of spiritual help these pianos need. And next to it is a red stamp with a stylized "JM" logo. I don't know if this was John at Major Key or some other JM, but whatever. It's one of those cool finds that makes every piano unique.
The Day After The Day After Christmas (12/27/06): I stayed up until 3 AM scraping the old glue off in preparation for installing the new damper modules, only slicing myself with the exacto knife once. I didn't notice when I started, but it seemed like I was working on it for 3 hours. I decided to remove the assembly completely and put it on the living room floor, so it would be easier to get to the glue-crusted part, and so I could watch MTV Jams at the same time. I found another Longevity symbol and the "JM" on the side of the assembly, so it's safe to assume that whoever "JM" was, he tore this thing apart too. In the end, the glue was mostly removed, and the wood beneath was rough and gouged in spots, so a big sanding job is in order before I do the dampers. I also started examining how the bridle straps are attached to the hammers: the fabric end is shoved into a tiny slot (maybe with a very thin screwdriver?), and then drops of glue are added on the open ends of the slot to secure the strap further. Considering that all of the straps are intact, I started wondering whether replacing them all is worth it. I emailed Ted at Speakeasy to ask how they do it:
- Remove the old strap and clear the hole with a small drill bit. Also clean out the slot so that there is no glue in there.
- Place the hole of the bridle strap on the small spike that is half way between the vertical part of the hammer and the pivot end.
- Stretch the strap over the back of the hammer and double it over as you stuff it into the slot. Apply a few drops of CA [Cyanoacrylate, a.k.a. Super Glue] to the end of the hole, so it wicks through the hole and into the fabric.
- Once dry, trim off the excess strap.
This all leaves me wondering...can I really do this 73 times??!?!??!?!?!
The piano in pieces. Many pieces.
The Day After New Year's (01/02/07): I'd like to say that I've been too hung over to think about working on the Rhodes since the weekend, but since I only had one beer the whole time I guess I don't have any excuses. Today I took a few minutes while reinstalling XP on my laptop and sanded down the chunks of glue and splintered wood leftover from my damper removal project last week. And now that I'm done installing XP, I'm finally adding the photo doc to this page! The piano is completely disassembled, waiting for me to decide what's next. The easier part is to redo the key pedestal felts with the Major Key kit and put Vintage Vibe's Miracle Mod bumps back on, which will get that component back in the state it was a month ago. After that, it's dampers, felts & bride straps. I figure I will approach it one damper module at a time, learning as I go. I just hope the learning curve isn't too steep...and that it doesn't involve accidentally destroying any parts in the process!!!
All Felt Up (01/06/07): Now that most of the glue has peeled off of my fingers, I guess it's safe to type again. I spent small pieces of my nights this week slowly re-felting the key pedestals, which took a lot more time and was a lot more tedious than I expected, but it didn't hurt to be careful. I ended up watching The Jerk and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (for comic relief and to break up the monotony), and the Ray Charles: Soul of the Holy Land DVD that I picked up at Bookshop Santa Cruz for $7 last weekend (for pure inspiration). This was a one-hour "lost concert" film from 1973 that is about half acoustic piano and half Suitcase 73, with the Suitcase's tone being beautifully dirty between however they were mic'ing it and the overall lo-fi sound quality of the recording. He doesn't really kick in with the Fender Rhodes until halfway through the show, but it is worth the wait.
As far as the actual work went, the Major Key replacement felts with the peel-off adhesive worked pretty well. They were all longer than necessary because they expect you to use the extra felt for the key pedestal bump, so a lot of my time was spent turning each key upside down on top of the felt to be used, then cutting the extra felt off using the pedestal block to measure it. So now I have 73 small pieces of spare felt to work with in the future, since I'm using the plastic bumps from the Vintage Vibe Miracle Mod again. When Frederik and I tried this the first time, we decided to super-glue the bumps on top of the felts (i.e. the quick way) instead of underneath (i.e. the correct way). I don't know which is better, but I guess if the bumps on top don't really work, I can just slice them off again....
I'm still thinking that the next phase will be done one 12-key damper module at a time, since I've run out of excuses to start on it. This will mean putting felts on the dampers, screwing them into place, adjusting the damper arm positions and finally replacing the bridle straps key-by-key. The more I think about this whole procedure, the more I just want to be able to play the damn piano again!!!
This had better be a temporary situation.
State Of The Studio (01/11/07): The digital camera finally returned yesterday, so I had a chance to catch up on the missing photos tonight. Right now I'm too busy and burnt to get moving on the next piece of this project, which will be the dampers, their felts & bridle straps. In the meantime, here's a pic of my home studio/kitchen corner in disarray. Note that my cheap-ass M-Audio Keystation has taken the place of the real Rhodes keybed, as a means of survival for now. I've got it connected to my XV-5050 with the SRX-12 Classic EPs board installed, but we all know it's not the same....
The bridle straps before & after.
I Guess I Picked The Wrong Week To Quit Sniffing Glue (01/12/07): It was super glue time again tonight as I installed half of the Speakeasy bridle straps while watching Airplane! and Police Squad! as background entertainment. I'm halfway done (39 keys worth) and only broke one strap so far while experimenting in the beginning. Here are the details of my process, based on the Speakeasy instructions (I'm blogging this so I don't forget it):
- Unscrew the hammer and remove it.
- Using an exacto knife, cut off the old strap and scrape out the stuff that's stuck inside the slot.
- Push a dead tine through the slot (which is circular and about the same size) to clear out what's left.
- Get a new strap ready.
- Each hammer has a tiny pin prick on the front of it. Put the hole in the leather-ish part of the strap over this pin to ensure the correct length.
- With the strap still hooked over the pin, wedge the end of the strap into the slot. (I originally tried this with the blunt edge of the exacto knife, but it was still too sharp! I ended up grabbing one of the old damper arms to use as a tool, which was thin and flexible enough to do the job without damaging the strap.)
- Making sure the strap is in the slot as completely as possible, put a big drop of super glue on the part of the strap that is in the slot, then put additional drops in each side of the slot.
- Give the glue a minute to dry completely, then cut off the extra piece of the strap.
- Screw the hammer back in and move on to the next one....
The New Rhodes Has Arrived (01/18/07): Not my new Rhodes. It's "the" New Rhodes, a.k.a. the Mark 7 being shown at NAMM this weekend. After years of being strung along with empty promises, the people behind this project finally have something real to show us. I don't have the time or money to head down to LA to play this thing myself, but so far the pianos look cool. I've been looking around the streets of my town this week to count the number of "New" VW Beetles as compared with the "Real" Beetle, and the ratio is about 10 to 1 in favor of the New Beetle. Maybe it's because I live near the mall and not in the nearby hills where all the retired hippies live. But it still has me wondering: why the hell am I spending all this time rebuilding a 32-year-old piano????
Out With The Old, In With The New (01/23/07): Last night I had the honor and privilege of seeing Joey DeFrancesco with Bobby Hutcherson (who I think should've been the one with top billing!) at one of the small clubs here in Santa Cruz. I was crammed into the corner at stage left in order to get the best view of Joey's playing, mainly to watch his foot techniques, and getting a great angle on the musical dialogue between him and Bobby. And guess what...Joey was on the New B3!!! OK, so most of us would have expected this knowing that he has an endorsement deal with Hammond Suzuki. What I didn't expect was how close to the real thing it sounded, with the New Leslie and everything. I ended up buying their Organic Vibes album off of iTunes, which according to the liner notes he recorded using Jimmy Smith's 1959 B3. I swear that I can't tell the difference between his sound last night and what's on the recordings, even though I know there is one.
On the other hand, there's Bobby's vibes. The recording does not do their tone justice compared with the experience in a live room. The metal bars have depth and resonance when you're that close to the stage, something that mic's just don't pick up. The Rhodes seems to have the same effect, although it's only the player who experiences it. You feel the hammers moving and the tines vibrating, no matter how loud your amp is. There's something inspirational about it. Maybe that's the source of all of the energy I've found to rebuild my new friend here.
I've also continued my Beetle Spotting game, with the "New" vs. "Real" ratio now looking more like 20 to 1. In a town like Santa Cruz you'd expect it to be the other way around (there's even a shop called the "Old Volks Home" a few miles from my apartment). I guess the tides are changing everywhere. But I did see one "Real" Beetle in beautiful condition with what looked like a new medium blue paint job that shined from halfway down the street. I also saw a gorgeous T-Bird the same day, which leaves me to wonder if cars like that are for Sunday Driving Only. That's my intent for this piano: to be played at home only, except for the occasional important gig where I can convince somebody to help carry it down the stairs....
Strapped In And Ready For Action (02/04/07): OK, I'm not really ready to write this part up, but I needed to blog the damper felt installation process:
- Get one of the damper modules and the 12 felts for it ready.
- Put a few drops of super glue on the at least half of the damper arms (yes, on the metal) and let it dry for a few seconds. With the Speakeasy dampers, there is a bend at the end of each arm in the middle & upper registers. The felt goes on top of the part that bends forward toward the namerail, positioning the felts to make contact with the tine at a slightly forward angle.
- Take a felt and put a bunch of super glue on the underside.
- Place the felt on the arm where the semi-dry glue is, then hold it there for 10 seconds, applying a small amount of pressure on the top.
- Repeat this process for the rest of the arms in the damper comb.
- Finally, do the "twang" test. This means pushing down on the felt of each damper arm and watching it vibrate, to make sure the felt is really glued on there.
Once I had an entire module felted, I used my dead tine to push the bridle strap "teeth" down a little, giving enough room to push them through each bridle strap hole. I stood the action assembly on its side, hooked each bridle strap in, then finally screwed in the module. Pushing up on each hammer from the underside verified that the damper arms were doing their job.
I've got an entire photo shoot of my process that I'll add in the near future. Right now I'd rather be spending my time getting this piano to be playable again!!!
Sustainable (02/07/07): Today I decided to put the damper bar back in, now that I'm finally done replacing the dampers. This was pretty simple, or at least it seemed simple until I had to deal with the little spring that keeps the damper bar from moving side to side. It goes over one of the pins on the side of the bar, and it needs to be squashed between the end of the bar and the wood block. Somehow you need to keep it squashed while screwing in the little plate that holds the pin in place. I'm not sure how I did it, but after 15 minutes it finally gave in. After that, I installed the Vintage Vibe "Sustain Guide Cup", which I hope will live up to its purpose and keep the pushrod in place when I eventually start using the sustain pedal with this thing. Now I've got the action assembly screwed back in, which feels like a milestone. Next is putting the keys back in, and after that it's rewiring the pickup rail. As with the bridle straps, I'm not sure why I'm putting myself through it, but hopefully it will be worth it down the road....
Return Of The Keybed (02/08/07): I put the keys back in the piano this afternoon while my daughter watched Star Wars for the sixth time this week, hoping to call this part of the project completed. So much for optimism. The new key pedestal felts have been lightly doused with silicon spray, which I thought would be enough to get started. In most cases I think it worked, but the C# above middle C just wants to stick for some reason. And the replacement high C key is the right size, but the front guide pin doesn't line up at all, so that makes two candidates for analysis. Drilling the bottom of the high C to widen the guide pin hole is probably the solution there, but that C# is a little disturbing. Everything looks OK with that one, and it does its job in getting the hammer to strike, so maybe it just needs another hit with the silicon spray. We'll see what happens when I work on configuring the dampers and escapement.
The other interesting and confusing thing was the paper "O" rings that go on top of the balance rail felts. I was able to pick out 4 different types, which differ both in color and strength or thickness. Some are like cardboard while others are like paper. I decided to use the green cardboard rings as a starting point, with the intent of using the thinner rings later if I can actually figure out how to use them....
The Rail (02/10/07): Today I got up the nerve to start rewiring the pickup rail, which has been a very educational experience so far. My original angle was to remove the RCA jack and the first chaining wire on top, which made some sense considering that the wire from the RCA terminal attaches to the pickup for the low E along with the start of the chaining wire. I replaced the RCA jack with a 24K gold one that I got from Major Key a few years ago, using new wire to attach it to the pickups. The wire is 7-stranded 24 gauge, which is similar to what was originally used in the factory as far as I can tell. I stripped a few inches of new wire, wrapped the end around the bottom pickup and applied solder to both that wire and the one from the RCA terminal, connecting the two. From there I wrapped the wire around each pickup terminal, leaving slack for later adjustment of the pickup positions, and applying solder to each terminal while making sure that the loop of wire was being securely fastened at each point.
Feeling victorious, I plugged the namerail cable back in and fired up the amp. And guess what. There was an assload of ground noise. Beautiful.
Upon messing around with the various solder joints, I figured out that the RCA terminal wire wasn't connected in the right way, so I went back to try again. This involved exposing more wire so that it could be wrapped around the end of the terminal several times, then putting a huge blob of solder on there to make sure it didn't move. Fortunately I had the original RCA jack for reference, which was very helpful in determining what the hell happened. Another thing worth mentioning is that there's a plastic ring the separates the tip from the sleeve of the RCA jack, which was a lot harder to see on the Major Key version since it's made of white plastic instead of black. I'm just glad I noticed that it was there before I went melting the wrong thing.
Something else I noticed in examining the problem was that each pickup has a single strand of wire coming out of the pickup coil and attaching to the terminal. We're talking tiny here. That seems like a potentially dangerous (and destructive) point of failure when you're dealing with a soldering iron!!! Your best bet is to apply the solder to the top of the terminal, making sure the wire doesn't move while making sure not to touch anything else with the iron at the same time....
After a while I decided to put the original RCA jack in, to see if that fixed the problem (i.e. assuming that the new wiring was doing its job otherwise). Miraculously, it fixed everything. My best guess is that soldering the wire to the gold terminal wasn't effective, so it seemed like going back to what works was the best solution. Nobody sees the pickup rail anyway, so who gives a crap if the jack on the end looks pretty. But I did start to get ideas about splitting the pickup rail output so that the signal could be fed to both the dashboard preamp and direct to an external preamp. More on that later.
In preparation for the rest of the rewiring, I went through all of the pickups and adjusted them to the middle position, which will help in determining the correct length of wire to use in each chain. We'll see how it goes.
You Must Go Into The Closet (02/13/07): Over the last couple of days I have had Frank Zappa's "A Token Of My Extreme" looping in my head, after deciding to empty my closet of musical gear and put the parts of my Rhodes in there for protection (i.e. not because I'm a Latent Appliance Fetishist, unless the Rhodes counts as an appliance...). I was tired of the cat stomping on the pickup rail and exposed tonebars, and when I stripped the tolex off Sunday night, the wood was so nasty from the old glue that I didn't want to keep the cabinet out in the open (but who knows, maybe the cat would have licked the glue off for me). The tolex on the lid was already peeling from age, so peeling it off wasn't that tough. It was the bottom that was harder to deal with, since it was in much better shape. I was able to slowly remove it by hand, considering the possibility of re-tolexing the piano (and saving the original pieces for measurement), but there were certain points where the glue was still strong enough to splinter the wood underneath. Having the same experience with my Suitcase years ago, I knew what I was up against, but it still happened. At least it wasn't really destructive this time, and since it's on the underside of the piano it won't be noticeable. When I finish sanding the wood to stain and varnish it, that is.
So now I've got two masochistic chores ahead: sanding down the cabinet to make it look beautiful, and rewiring the rest of the pickup rail. Why I am doing this to myself, I still don't know, especially since the original pickup wiring is doing its job except for the bad soldering job. I guess I'm just a purist in that department. But the sanding does seem worth it, especially since I'm not gigging with this thing regularly and won't have as many chances to screw up the finish. But the unanswered question is...what color??!?!!!
The Ides Of March (03/15/07): Looking for a new job sucks. Especially when you're trying to work another job that will be ending at random someday soon. Or not so soon. Who the hell knows. Yesterday I went to the dentist and found out that I need a root canal. That just perked me right up. And on Monday I had to reject the best offer I've ever had from a company in Palo Alto that doesn't let people take laptops in or out of their offices. Which would have meant 5 hours of commuting on public transportation every day, without a computer, i.e. without time to even work on projects in Reason for my own entertainment. So, seeing an unforeseeable future ahead of me, I began thinking about working on the Rhodes again during my unpredictable free time over the next weeks, or months, or whatever. And I couldn't remember what the hell I was working on last, at least not until I read this blog this morning. I'm glad I've been writing things down.
I still don't know why I decided to rewire the pickup rail, since adding solder to the joints probably would have solved the problems with it. But I do know why I was going to refinish the cabinet, and I think that will be my next step. I have plenty of time to scope out colors and sand everything down in preparation. That seems to be the simpler way to go, and simple is what I need right now.
In other news, before I made my trip back to Connecticut to find out that my job was going to disappear, I got to meet Jon Furulund from Vintagebua and his bandmembers while they traveled up and down the West Coast of the US looking for deals on vintage boards. If you're wondering where his collection came from, this is obviously a big clue. Before he left for his next gear stop, I was trying to convince him to record that Dyno so we can hear what it really sounds like!!! I guess we'll see when and if it happens. This also reminded me that I still haven't been in touch with Chuck Monte now that we're in driving distance of each other again. An interview with him for the site is long overdue....
Black It Is (03/22/07): Tomorrow my can of Jet Black stain is arriving. But the wood is not ready. Not even close. After a few attempts at sanding down the lid to expose the bare wood, I figured out that I was actually grinding the glue in instead of removing it from the surface. I'm glad I started this experiment with the top instead of the bottom. I ended up getting a steel chiseled paint scraper to remove the nasty 30-year-old glue, which has been more effective so far, but it's still taking a damn long time. What I wonder now is whether it will look cooler if I just stain the hell out of it and make it as black as possible, or try to go the "translucent" route and leave the wood grain visible. There's at least one stamp I found underneath the tolex that was probably on the wood already when they got it from the lumber yard, which could be a cool little feature. But that would mean exposing all of the damage to the wood along with it, which probably wouldn't be so cool. Again, the victim of this experiment will be the lid. We'll see what happens.
The Glue! The Glue! I Can't Find The Glue!!! (04/05/07): Yesterday I preordered the new Vaulternative FZ release Buffalo, a show from 1980 that I'm really hoping will have some killer Rhodes work by my old friend and guru Tommy Mars. (But since there's no track listing on the website, who the fuck knows what's on it....) Anyway, I took the advice of Mr. Pale from Croatia and started using a scrubber sponge to remove the glue, since it's not water soluble and washes off relatively easily compared to the sandpaper and paint scraper methods I've tried so far. After thinking seriously about having a cabinet maker build a new case with a custom lid that would give me an extra shelf on top of the flat top it will already have so that I could stack my two 61-key controllers up there and plug them into my VK-8M for a conveniently placed dual-manual organ setup, I decided to go the "free is where you don't have to pay for nothing" route and spent about a half hour washing the glue off and made a lot of progress with the bottom half of the cabinet, although I'm continuing to have problems with the wood splintering around the holes for the leg flanges. I guess we'll see how well the stainable "liquid wood" I picked up works when the glue is finally gone. At least it's on the bottom of the piano where nobody will notice.
Finally starting to make a little progress???
Bach-in It (04/11/07): My wife & daughter have been in San Diego for the last 2 days, which has left me here alone with just the cat & the fish. Since I'm a computer programmer, an off-hours webmaster and a father, I have no real friends (i.e. they're all virtual ones). OK, I have at least one friend within a few hundred miles of here. You guessed it. My Stage 73 with glue all over it. I spent the last 2 nights trying to get the glue off with a "non-scratch" scrubber and a bucket of water, with a decent amount of success. My word of warning, though, is don't overdo it. Tonight I had to work harder on some spots, and with the wood getting soaked after a while, the "non-scratch" sponge turned into wet sandpaper. This wasn't a big deal in most places, but in a couple of spots it started finely splintering the wood. Not focusing on a single spot for more than a few minutes at a time, drying & wiping off the spot after you're finished and scrubbing along the grain of the wood has given me the best results. It still seems like this will take forever, but it does seem to be moving along at a faster pace. At least we're getting more sunlight each day here in the Northern Hemisphere.
I've been listening to my entire Weather Report collection tonight while working out on the porch, after having listened to Buffalo a couple of times since it arrived on Monday. Tommy Mars is great at that show, not on the Rhodes but on the E-Mu Modular System that Frank had him using for what must have been Tommy's entire career with the band. That thing made for a killer lead synth and was played by a killer musician. In general this is an interesting concert for Zappa fans to hear, since it features a lot of his songs in development before they were cut on vinyl a year or two later. But it's definitely not a Rhodes album, even though there's one on stage and Bob Harris takes a solo in the middle of "The Torture Never Stops". Whatever. I have enough great Rhodes albums to keep me occupied for a while here.
And on a final note for tonight, my wife called to tell me that they stopped for a break in Fullerton (birthplace of the Fender Rhodes and home of Major Key) and saw a limo with the license plate "DAVE L". Perhaps the RhodesMan himself was down there on business this week!
Losing Patience (04/25/07): Last night I spent another half hour scrubbing the bottom half of the cabinet, this time with a coarse sanding sponge and warm water, which is intended for paint removal. My little girl asked if she could help, so I let her scrub the bottom. That was about as effective as my work over the last half hour, or so it seemed. I toweled off the cabinet and brought it back inside, saving it for yet another day. Having started a new job at a small company a few weeks ago, I have even less time to deal with this project. And it's all for the sake of rebuilding a piano that will sit next to my computer, never seeing another gig and probably never making it on a professional recording either. Which leads me to think, once again, why the hell am I doing this??!?!!?
It's the one on the right.
So I decided to spend some time with my little red guy, who sits on my desk with the rest of my gear and gives me a taste of the Rhodes experience whenever I'm longing for it. I finally opened it up and replaced the top hammer tip with one to match the rest in that octave, something that I had meant to do when the guys at Speakeasy finished their overhaul, which followed their exact procedures regardless of the piano's strange size. This meant that the B key (#44) had a harder tip installed, which gave it a much stronger attack compared to the neighboring Bb (#43), which is at the end of the softer durometer range surrounding middle C. Replacing the tip and readjusting that one key took another half hour out of my life, and I wound up with super glue all over my hand again. And there are still things that are funky about it. Welcome to the Rhodes world.
Some interesting things I noticed in the process were that for one, whatever adhesive Speakeasy uses to attach the hammer tips is strong, maybe something like a thin plastic strip with glue on each side. It took a lot of careful invasion with an exacto knife to get under the tip and pop it off, and "pop" isn't even the right word. Anyway, after the hard tip was swapped with the softer one, things seemed more even, but there was a lot to do with adjusting escapement and pickup placement. The pickups were previously setup to be extremely close to the tines, and the top two keys appeared to be so close that the magnet was affecting sustain, so I backed those off a little. And on top of that, the softer tips on the Bb & B keys don't seem to give them as much punch as the others, which explains a lot about why the hammer tips increase in hardness as you go up the keyboard. The shorter tines need to be whacked harder to get decent sustain & tone out of them.
And after doing more reading about the Buddhist principles of impermanence and generosity lately, my minimalist mind came to the forefront again. Why am I putting so much work into rebuilding an instrument that takes up half of my tiny studio space when I already have a Rhodes in near-perfect condition??? The little red guy has all 12 tones of the chromatic scale and can therefore play any chord I want in a closed voicing. I know I'm able to play the changes from "It's About That Time", and with the pitch shifter it has the perfect range for the bass intro from "I Wish". Using the 2-octave Oxygen8 controller with Reason on my laptop continues to give me the sense that yes, I can make satisfying music with a couple of tiny keyboards. Being a piano, organ & bass player, my left hand doesn't know what to do, but I guess that's what pitch bend & mod wheels are for. When it comes to the 12-key Rhodes, the knobs on the pitch shift box correlate with this concept, don't they....
The state of my closet today. And every day.
Now this all leaves me wondering: what do I do with a torn-apart Stage 73 besides shoving it back in the closet??? I think of the Buddha again and the principle of generosity, imagining selling the piano for cheap as a "project" for a musician who could do something more with it (as I did with my original Stage 73 several years ago). And then I think of selling the parts individually to people who can use them, keeping only the middle octave to repair my little Mark II if it ever came to that, and even imagining what a plastic-key Mark II would sound like with the mid-70's tines and half-wood/half-plastic hammers. And who knows what would happen with the pickup rail that John at Major Key had remanufactured. I think I would have to return it to him, because I can't imagine selling something like that. So many possibilities. Too many possibilities.
So here we are. I have been watching the Circle of Life in the fish tank over the last couple of weeks, as 7 babies have emerged from beneath the gravel while one of the adults has returned to his place in the cosmos and another is refusing to go. Perhaps it is time for this Rhodes to make its return to the musical cosmos, even if it happens piece by piece.
Being Patient (04/30/07): This weekend I took a look at the bottom of the piano cabinet standing in the hall next to the closet with the cat's litter box, and despite the smell, it finally started to look like I was getting somewhere with this whole thing. I spent another 2 hours scrubbing the thing down with a pair of sanding sponges, and now it's mainly the inside that needs the most scouring. I keep reminding myself that once all the glue is off and I've smoothed out the wood, putting the assembly back in will be an easy step. And I will finally be able to play the thing again. And spend a lot of time adjusting the new parts. Woo-hoo.
As I mentioned before, we have more sunlight every day and the weather is warming here on the Central Coast, so there's more time to work outside. After I'm done staining the bottom, the top of the case will be Round 2. More glue removal. More sanding. More staining. At least I've had some practice, so that part shouldn't take as long. I've already removed the compartment where the legs are stored, which puts me one step closer to my big plan for the lid: sawing it in half and putting on hinges. This is inspired by the Dyno flat-top modification, but my idea is to saw the top at a 45 degree angle (or even sharper) to create for of a keybed cover like you'd find on an acoustic piano. It won't look like it, but it will function like it. I really don't need the cat stomping on the keys anymore.
Didjeridude (05/07/07): I live and work in an art town, a college town, a tourist town, a beach town. My office is a pretty typical cube farm, but I have the luxury of a window seat with a view of the freaks on Pacific Ave. It's a new job, so I'm still figuring out what I'm doing here, but I already knew what the general scene is like downtown. A few days after I started, I head some sort of weird low-pitched buzzing sound coming from the room behind me. My first thought was that it sounded like a didjeridoo, and I figured it was probably some sort of problem with the air conditioning or maybe somebody listening to a weird relaxation CD. Then I looked outside. It really was a didjeridoo. There are a lot of street musicians around here, but this guy is a little bit out of the ordinary. He's been back on the corner a few times in the last couple of weeks, making my otherwise dry office life a little more interesting. Thanks man, whoever you are. I need to bring my acoustic/electric bass downtown and jam with you sometime.
So I spent the entire weekend listening to Jamiroquai. The Rhodes playing on their first three albums is gorgeous at times, but as my friend who introduced me to them said, it's their bass lines that really make the groove. And on Friday I had talked to another friend who was old enough to have known and jammed with guys from The Dead and the Steve Miller Band, who was digging out guitars and amps from his basement and describing how great some of them still sound. He was saying that as a songwriter, he really wants to get into using the computer for sketching out ideas, but between the software learning curve and not being a keyboard player it's just not happening for him. Remember the days when electric instruments were simple enough to just plug in and play? and recording meant turning on a tape machine???
Then on Saturday, I got out the acoustic/electric bass, plugged it in and did a couple of duets with one of the piano-playing moms at my daughter's birthday party. I had only been using it as an acoustic since I bought it a few months ago, so hearing it amped was bizarre. I got a tiny sense of the acoustic vibrations while the amp pumped out an electric sound with a very edgy high end. This left me thinking that it's time to pick up a regular electric with a resonant body, because it feels so much more natural to play. But what really hit me was that playing a Rhodes is the same experience, being an electric instrument that creates its own resonant vibrations, even without the amp. There's something there that a synth or digital piano will never recreate. There's something there that really makes your playing come alive. That's why I'm spending hours, days, weeks, months putting this Rhodes back together. And that's why I'm trading in some of my digital synths for a Fender Jazz Bass. Tomorrow.
Come On, Come Over (05/10/07): The Didjeridude was back today, but not for long, and I wasn't inspired to put on Jamiroquai this time. I've been listening to the Jaco Pastorius solo album from 1976 as the inspiration for playing my new fretless J-Bass, which has been very inspirational since I brought it home a few days ago. The one difference between this bass and a Rhodes so far is that my fingers aren't sore as hell after playing the Rhodes for an hour. But I'm not complaining. I'm just glad the fingerboard has those cheater lines and the tiny dots hiding on the side of the neck, so that you can only blame intonation errors on yourself. I guess that's the second difference. At least when you play a note on the Rhodes, you know it's going to be out of tune every time.
Sunlight (05/21/07): Yesterday was a beautifully clear day in Santa Cruz, and having the sunlight to work with showed me where the cabinet still needed sanding. I went to work with the sponges again, and after a while I realized that they were doing nothing. So I let the wood dry in the sun. And the old glue dried too! I was able to finally remove the rest with the paint scraper, this time doing little damage to the wood, and when I was done the cabinet actually felt smooth everywhere. Next on the list is filling in the big holes and splintered areas with "liquid wood", staining the cabinet, and then covering it with the sanding sealer that Tim Nelson recommended to me, which should fill in the remaining gaps. And after that it's another round of sanding to really polish things up, and a final coat of wood finish to seal it all the way. Which leaves a final question about the finish: satin, gloss or sparkle? I think the choice is an obvious one....
Finished (07/02/07): Yeah, right. I meant the bottom half of the cabinet. My time has been consumed by other things lately (like switching jobs again after being "let go"), so I don't exactly remember what my process was, and after an entire weekend of using spray cans I probably have a little more brain damage than before. So here's an estimate of my process for staining and finishing the cabinet:
- Spend a few weeks using coarse sanding sponges and water to remove the nasty 32-year-old glue from the cabinet. The water also helps to get rid of preexisting stains. Sometimes.
- As the weeks go by, the glue starts to dry out, making it easier to sand off. After a while using medium-grade sandpaper works better.
- When the glue is finally gone, use a combination of medium and fine sandpapers to smooth out the surface, since the sharp edges and splinters aren't very friendly to your hands (which you will obviously need to both play the piano and carry it around). Also use wood putty or filler to plug up any holes and dents you find, which will be stained and sanded down in the next couple of steps. And make sure the filler is dry before you stain it!
- Stain the cabinet 2 times to get started, letting it dry completely between each coat. I used a water-based black stain.
- When it is totally dry after the second coat, apply the sanding sealer.
- When the sanding sealer is dry, use fine sandpaper to smooth things out again. This theoretically isn't supposed to damage the stain beneath, but for me it stripped half of it off. So much for the "sealing" part. At the least the cabinet was completely smooth afterwards.
- Stain the cabinet 4 more times, or however many it takes to get the color as dark as you want it. Make sure you're letting it dry between coats.
- Use a clear wood finish to finally seal the stain. I used a "satin" spray that left it looking pretty natural after 5 or 6 coats (again letting it dry for at least 30 minutes between each coat). Gloss and sparkle finishes would be popular alternatives, I'm sure, but I really like how the satin turned out.
While I was running away from the toxic clouds between coats, I got the keys out and hit them with a couple of heavy coats of silicon spray. I ended up sorting all of the keys first to make sure I had them all (after having stored them in a bag in the closet for however many months), and the only strange thing I found was that one of the pedestal felts had fallen off. I guess the peel-off backing on the replacement felts is a little suspect, but also considering how easy it was to pop off the old hammer tips, I think having some super glue around is a good idea for emergency repairs. We'll see what happens when I actually get to play the damn thing in however many months from now.
Putting the hardware back on wasn't too big of a deal, since I had made notes of what screws went where and had bought replacement parts a while back (the rusted tee nuts all needed to be trashed for sure, since they're what hold things like the leg flanges in place). Once the legs were screwed in, it was time to put the keybed back in its place. One of the new damper felts had also fallen off, so I super glued it back on (there was no sticky back to blame for that one). All of the keys slipped back in without any problems. Except for one. I had 2 white keys that I got from Vintage Vibe to match the 1975 piano, which they both did in size and color, and one worked fine. The other, however, was getting stuck against the key next to it and killing the action. It turned out that the replacement key wasn't exactly lining up with the front guide pin, even after I tried bending the pin a little. The solution was to use an exacto knife and remove the felt from the hole beneath the capped part of the key, along with a little of the wood surrounding it. The resulting wider hole accommodated the front guide pin, and the action was back to normal. A little something to think about when swapping keys between pianos!
Judge me by my size, do you?
Good the piano is looking.
It's a "Fender Rhodes".
Fender amp knobs, true to its heritage.
Enjoy it while it lasts, kitty...
So now the piano is reassembled, but with the harp & pickup rails in need of serious attention. The pickup rail is only about 10% rewired, the harp needs a couple of tine & tonebar replacements, and the entire thing will need to be voiced. Not to mention that the dampers have never been adjusted, and I am hand-painting the original harp cover as a red sparkle top without much success so far (more on that later). There's a long road ahead for sure. At least I have the little red guy to comfort me in the meantime. And speaking of that, I tracked down a Fender MT-10 Mini Twin 2 x 3" amp on Ebay (1 watt of raw power!), which fits perfectly on top of the Mark II namerail. I can't believe the kind of nasty drive I can get out it...and it doesn't even irritate my neighbors....
The Lid (07/13/07): Now that the bottom of the piano looks fabulous, I need to deal with the top. I've still been trying to get the leftover glue off with sanding sealer, the paint scraper, heavy sandpaper and everything else I used on the bottom. I can't deal with the scraping anymore, so I decided to cover the wood with felt on the inside and leave the outside bare. Who cares what it looks like. Its only reason to be in my life is to protect the piano when I move it and hide in the closet the rest of the time.
Last night I made my first attempt at covering the inside, which involved several sheets of felt and colored craft foam, cut and overlapped with about 100 staples joining them all together. I had originally tried affixing the felt with fabric glue, but the glue just bled through and got all over my hands. So I went crazy with the staple gun instead. I put the hinges and corners on the lid afterward and tried closing the piano with it: there was so much padding that one of the side latches couldn't even hook on enough to close it. That's when I decided it was time to start over again. I have another batch of felt sheets, will be taking out the crappy foam and putting the new felt on with rubber cement this time. Rubber cement seems a lot like the nasty glue that was underneath the old tolex, so it should do the job. Here's hoping that it's more friendly toward the felt than the fabric glue was.
Son Of The Lid (07/20/07): I've pretty much started over again with the lid, taking everything off except the felt on the edges and scraping the rest of the glue out of the inside. The funny and/or bizarre thing is that after using my paint scraper for so long and watching it get more dull, I tried turning it over and the other edge is super sharp??!?!!! I swear that it was not like this when I bought it. Whatever happened, it's working much better now. Most of the glue is gone and I'm covering parts of the inside with another round of felt. And I got more of the foam padding to cover the outside this time, which will be a lot more functional and will look nice with some groovy stickers to seal the seams. Another weekend of glue is ahead, but this should be the last of it. And once I've finished the lid, the piano will be ready to go back in the closet again, since it takes up too much of the space we don't have in our apartment. But the lease is up next month. Maybe it's time to move into a bigger place with a music room.
And to further infuriate the many disgruntled Rhodes seekers out there, a friend of mine picked up a Mark V in good condition, without the sustain pedal but with the original Peterson folding stand, all for $300. The guy he bought it from also got it for $300 but wasn't playing it, so he passed it along for the same price because he needed the cash. This is exactly what happened with my 1972 Mark I a few years back, before the prices really started to jack up. Another ounce of hope for people desperately trying to find something affordable. OK, maybe a mL of hope is the better measurement....
Putting The Fender Back In My Rhodes (08/18/07): So it's been a slow few weeks since the last time I really worked on my piano, but things have definitely been interesting otherwise: Speakeasy announced that they have successfully remanufactured tines in the mid-70's style; Major Key's website mysteriously disappeared for a few days; the prototype Rhodes Mark 7's are being pimped around LA in order to gain exposure; and David Ell had a flame war with himself on the Yahoo! Rhodes Group, driving a nail in the coffin of both the group and whatever remains of his own reputation. Yikes.
But I have my own life to live here, and having a full-time job makes it tough to fit music in sometimes, let alone putting a 32-year-old electric piano back together. Over the past month I've done a little more work on the lid, and in honor of the people who donated this piano to me, I installed the Harmonic Clarifier, which is looking good. But I can't use it yet because the pickup rail is still hosed, so it's just there for looks in the short run. Actually, everything I've worked on has been about the piano's appearance until now. The cabinet is completely finished in black wood stain, the pickup rail was already beautiful thanks to John's rebuilding it, and the new felts & bridle straps inside are just plain fresh. The Harmonic Clarifier's faceplate also has a nice shine to it, but guess what...it doesn't have the "Rhodes" logo on it anywhere like the original did. And guess what...I like it that way.
A while back we were driving to my brother-in-law's house and I did a double-take when I saw a girl walking around with a black hooded sweatshirt. With a Fender Rhodes logo on the front?!?!??!?! I doubt that this was original Fender apparel, but it seemed so "real" with that old logo. And considering how bastardized the later "Rhodes" logo has become between Roland's abuse of it and now the use of it on the Mark 7 prototypes, seeing it has really started making me feel sad. So I decided to embrace the Fender in my Rhodes, especially since as a 1975 model it is in that strange year of transition where anything was possible depending on what parts the factory had available. I ordered the "Fender Rhodes" logos for both the front & back of the piano from Vintage Vibe and got a handful of stock Fender amp knobs that fit the pots on the Harmonic Clarifier. And now the namerail looks totally bad ass.
My next step is to finish cleaning up the lid so I can lock the cat out of the piano when I start working again. Once that's done I'll be ready to remove the harp cover (and leave it off), set the pickup rail aside (i.e. in the closet with the harp cover) and get into adjusting the action, key by key. Yeah. Woo-hoooo. I'll also be putting in a couple of the Speakeasy tines to see if they actually work, along with installing a set of their replacement hammer tips. It feels like starting over again, but at least the piano looks good. And in the meantime, I've got the little red guy to keep me company. With the new Mini Twin it's sounding ballsier than ever....
Enlightened (08/27/07): Last week I spent the little time I had after work trying to ramp up for what I thought was going to be a weekend of tearing the piano apart and adjusting the action one key at a time, one late night after another. I put more felt on the inside of the lid. The new tine from Speakeasy showed up for a test drive in the bottom register where the entire tone generator assembly was missing. And then at 4:45 on Friday, I got the call from my wife. The bags were packed. We were driving to San Diego.
I knew there was some sort of vague plan for the weekend but didn't realize how close to reality it was until I got up that morning. We would drive all night until we found a hotel in the area, pass out, wake up in time to spend the afternoon at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and then spend the evening at a concert with Wah!, and then go back to the hotel and pass out again. And then if we had the energy, we'd go see Wah! again at an afternoon benefit show at the Yahoo! Center in Santa Monica. And then we'd drive home in the middle of the night and pass out at 3 AM. And that's what happened.
So I got to spend the afternoon in a place devoted to preserving animal species that have gotten a raw deal in the last few centuries of human existence, a nature reserve that tries to be as close to home as it can be for these displaced creatures. It all seems so real when you're there, experiencing things that most people have only known through photos, TV or movies. Not to mention the things you don't see anywhere else. An elephant taking a huge crap while drawing patterns in the sand with his trunk. A cheetah being run around in circles chasing a huge cat toy made from a long stick, a rope and a football. A male zebra fully mounting a female in front of a tram full of unexpecting tourists and their children. By the end of the day we were definitely ready to do some relaxing, and the Wah! show was definitely that. The venue was filled with a barely noticeable mist that was there to catch the blue and green lasers slowly rotating and forming pseudo-random patterns on the walls, and the floor, and the people, creating an extremely psychedelic effect. The music was a fusion of Indian chanting, rock and reggae, based on a rhythm section of bass, drums & keyboard rounded out with a harmonium and other Indian instruments. Some songs had original lyrics, but most used ancient chants and mantras, and many turned into extended jams pushing 20 or 25 minutes. My head was in a better place by the time we left.
The challenge, though, was to keep my focus on the music and not on the MacBook that was MIDI-ed up to the keyboardist's vintage Kurzweil PC88. Yes. Amidst instruments that required no electricity to create sound and had proven themselves over decades and centuries, there was one guy playing laptop. But with all that softsynth power behind him, he only used one voice through the entire show. A sampled Rhodes. Or I should say, a sampled Rhodes doing the job of a real one that was safe at home. We picked up one of Wah!'s CDs that we didn't already own, and he was featured on a Suitcase with stereo vibrato for one of the two jams. And he wasn't credited as being on "keyboards". He was on "rhodes".
One Month Later (09/27/07): To answer the question, it was Lounge Lizard.
Over the course of the last month I made contact with Wah! and her current keyboardist, Matt Kelly, and it turns out that Wah! is really into the Rhodes sound. We ended up talking about alternatives to dragging a real one around on tour, and I had to recommend the Nord Stage, since that's what I would choose myself. I still haven't warmed up to the idea of "playing laptop" considering how flimsy the construction of a computer is, in terms of both hardware and software. One thing I can definitely say for Clavia is that my Nord Electro survived many gigs, with a small dent in one of the wooden cheekblocks being the only damage it had to show in the end....
So as a way of saying thanks for the advice and to talk more about things in person, Wah! invited us to a private party in Encinitas a few weeks later where she was the entertainment. No Rhodes, just her basic trio of harmonium - bass - drums. We thought we would be among total strangers, but it turned out that the Blisslights guy was participating again, and we had already met half of the people in the audience of the previous show. When they were done with the sound check, I got up the nerve to introduce myself and my companions, to which Wah! replied: "The Rhodes Family!" To which I replied: "No, that's somebody else...." After that part was over, I found out that she's got a Rhodes-heavy CD on the way as well as a European tour (i.e. with Matt on the Nord Stage). Now it's our job to line her up with a gig in Santa Cruz so she can borrow my Rhodes!
New Year's Resolutions (01/21/08): So in case you were following this blog at one point and wondered what the hell happened to my progress, my daughter conveniently dropped our digital camera off of our second-story apartment porch onto the sidewalk, I ended up leaving my last job and going on California state disability last September, and more recently I spent a good part of the Holiday Season in the hospital with 42 electrodes glued to my head while watching Forrest Gump, Elf, Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer and the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters marathon. Working on my Rhodes is something I've fantasized about, but it hasn't exactly been, shall we say, a priority.
But now that I seem to be pulling my life together again, I seem to have the energy and focus to deal with the 3 big problems ahead: a) rewiring the pickup rail and verifying the connections, b) adjusting the positioning of the newly-installed damper arms and c) voicing each of the keys, 2 of which are still in need of replacement generators. What do you think...1 month? 2 months? 3? 6??? I'm trying to be patient, but looking over the past year I'm wondering if too much patience means this thing will never be playable again. 2008 is it. My Fender Rhodes will make music again this year.
In the meantime I've got my laptop setup for gigs with NI's Elektrik Piano and their B4 II organ simulator, each running through a separate output to my Motion Sound KBR-M amp. This puts the B4 through the tube preamp and rotary horn channel while the EP sounds go straight into the solid-state 12" speaker, which is exactly what I'm looking for. Considering that I'll never find another Rhodes like the one I've got, and there are very few venues around here where it would seem like bringing an actual Rhodes would make any sense at all (i.e. in terms of size and payscale), this digital/analog hybrid rig is perfect for playing out. The real reason to get my Rhodes working again isn't to get it ready for gigs. It's so that I can feel what it's like to play it again.
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