Rhodes Stage 73

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this instrument it is not a synthasizer. It is the piano equivalent of the electric guitar. It is not a piano hawever. The timber is very different. It is more like a cross between an electric guitar and a vibraphone. It is very easy to use. Simply plug it in and play.

I have a later model with the rippled flat cover. Mine has the sterio vibrato which I love and I found that for instaces when I wanted normal vibrato I could plug any 1/4" anything (I use an 1/8" to 1/4" adapter with nothing pluged into it) into either of the power amp inputs to shut of the speakers on ome side causing the panning vibrato to not be able to pan (you will have to turn up the volume to compensate).

Since this is a real instrument with real hammers hitting real strings it is as expressive as the plyer. But be careful. Some of them have terrible action and that can be an expensive fix. Mine has beautiful action. Only slightly lighter than a real piano.

I have used it at gigs hundreds of times without backup. Get regular maintnance and you will have nothing to worry about.

Shop around for a repairman. I live in San Diego and I was able to find a guy that owns a pawnshop who has obscene knowledge about Rhodes and does my regular maintnance (tuning and setting pickup distance) for $50.

I love my Rhodes. I paid a lot for it but in cases like this you get what you pay for and it was worth every penny.

The suitcase model gave me goosebumps and the weight of it gave me muscles. Guys never wanted to help the keyboard player move gear, so I learned how to pick this puppy up by myself and get to gettin'...
The sound of the vibrato always made my day until the DXs came out. Then Rhodes were passe for about 12 years.
Using effects, you could do alot with this keyboard. Phasing, chorus, etc.

Awesome tines we had together!!!!

Always worked for me. The tuning was not a problem either. Every once in awhile I would have her serviced but not often.

I have two, one is the two piece model and the other is a student modsel made by CBS/Rhodes. i do not know if i would hurt too much now that the Nord Electro is out. As a matter of fact I have not used my Rhodes since 1988 for gigs, and not since 1993 for studio or furniture. But she is still here waiting for me when I want to have a flashback.

This is a real instrument. Plug it into an amp and play it. Try to find some roadies to tote it around, though.

73 notes. Distinctive sound. The sustain pedal is a little funky, though, as it has a tendency to collapse or slide away at inopportune moments. Bass boost and volume control are the only built-in controls, but run it through some guitar pedals, (especially a phase-shifter), and you will be duly impressed.

It is what it is. Every synth has a patch to duplicate it, but there are very few that even come close. The action is mushy, but with practice, can be very expressive. It's an excellent workout keyboard.

I can absoluetly depend on it. It's been through hell and back, and has never failed me. Any problems I had, I easily fixed myself.

Never needed support or repair, but I know of many places that still work on this unit.

If it were lost or stolen, I would get another one. Although I don't use it for gigs anymore, it's still my first choice when choosing the basic chords in the songwriting process.

Plug it in, switch it on, play it!

Full polyphony as it's physical as apposed to electronic. Has tremelo and that's it as far as effects are concerned.

The rhodes stage piano has a distinctive and definitive electric piano sound and is wonderfully expressive. Its fully touch sensitive weighted action works like a conventional piano but with metal tines instead of strings. Only trouble is that it is a pig to amplify - the tone is so mellow that to get it loud enough to cut through means risking a distorted sound, so it's use is pretty limited - I traded mine in for a Wurlitzer so I could make myself heard above the rest of the band.

Best suited to jazz. pop ballads, funk. Listen to Donald Fagen (Steely Dan) playing one and you'll hear it at its best.

It never let me down and I couldn't afford a backup. It seemed pretty solidly built, but it was HEAVY!

Never needed

For me as a player in a live band, the amplification problem was the big drawback so I've had to mark it down for that reason alone.

If I had the money to indulge myself I'd love to have one to play at home (a suitcase version though).

These days I use a Roland RD 600 on stage, which I love. As a backup (not that I anticipate needing one) I still have an old 73 note RD200. I also have a Roland D50 synth which I still use but will probably give it a well earned rest soon - I'm looking at the XP-30 as a replacement.

Set it up, plug it into an amp, like a guitar. Carrying it is the rough part. Putting the legs & pedal in a separate bag instead of the lid may help if it's too much of a struggle.

It's an instrument, not a digital representation of an instrument, with all the quirks most real instruments have. Action pretty much sucks, and anyone that doesn't think so probably didn't make their living with one when it was the only piano-like thing that you could load in a station wagon (actually, I carried mine in a Beetle for a while!)

The main reason I'm posting this is because of things other people said about the sounds - like "some keys are louder than others." That's very easy to fix - in fact, if you have a Rhodes, you should really take a little time and set it up to suit you, a lot like a guitar or bass. The pickups are all mounted on slides so they can move closer to or farther from the tines (comparable to the height of a guitar pickup), and the tines are mounted on two height-adjustable mounts, so that the angle and height relative to the pickup, which produces variations in tone comparable to having guitar pickups at the neck or the bridge. I liked a really hot, trebly, hard-edged tone, which I think I got by having the pickups really close and the tine at some sort of angle, off-center to the pickup.
On the other hand, we all hated the action. Mushy and slow, and I never tried one that didn't feel that way. Also, if you try to rapidly repeat one note it'll block - the hammers come up into the tine as the vibration is on its down cycle, so you get kind of a metallic clunk.

I haven't had a Rhodes in years, but when I did, I used it extensively in funk bands and beat it within an inch of my fingers' lives, playing those choppy funk rhythms all night, 5-6 nights a week. I got pretty strong, got to the point where I broke one or two tines most weeks. You carry pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers, some random screws and nuts and bolts, and a bag of tines, and if something breaks, you fix it. I don't think there was much that I couldn't fix during a 15-minute break, except I generally waited with the tines because the tuning was kind of tough to do in a noisy lounge. Better to not have the note than have it 1/4 step out. The worst thing was when I broke a pickup. Unsoldered it & bridged the wires till I got a replacement in. Taking care of these things is kind of like taking care of, oh, 10 or 12 guitars. Similar kinds of adjustments, but with 73 tines with pickups instead of strings.

I'm glad you guys can still get tines! That's the thing that would worry me the most, though I'm not quite as ham-handed as I was when Rick James was super-freakin'.

Well, mine took a dive out of the back of my Opel station wagon when I got hit head-on in the early 80's. I sold it to a piano technician who wanted to rebuild the case and probably did. I never bought another one, and although I've been through just about every step of the search for a good stage piano (from Kustom - yup, they really made an electronic piano that wasn't too awful for its day - to a Yamaha CP-70) any nostalgia I had for the tone was tempered by remembering that mushy action, and how easily cool voicings turned to mud. I'm much more acoustic-piano centered. But when I see a Rhodes it still takes me back... The most Rhodes-style fun I've had since was with a Yamaha KX-88 driving a Roland MKS-20. That box did a Rhodes much better than it did an acoustic piano, maybe better than the real thing.