The Light of Day

I digs me some Fender Rhodes

I actually plugged the thing in and noodled on it a little yesterday. Plus, I just transferred another Rhodes track into the computer for aligning and remixing. Two moments in particular on that tape gave me a wide smile of satisfaction, the way they hint at something more timeless and traditional — off the top of my head, Billy Preston’s stint with the Beatles, but obviously a lot more than that.

There’s just something neat about hearing an isolated electric piano track; because it can sit so unobtrusively in a mix and subtly fill out part of the spectrum (assuming you’re not Supertramp), it can go totally unnoticed. Then hearing it by itself, we’re all “ooh, neat, I never noticed that before”, even if it’s just some simple, clichéd little bluesy inflection.

The tone of the Fender Rhodes and similar instruments is perhaps a little overtly 70s-ish. (Perhaps?) An unusual timbral fingerprint, like it’s blatantly missing certain harmonics … kind of sounds like a doorbell, actually … and leaves a lot of space, so you can add a lot of extra notes to a chord without cluttering up the whole song. You can get away with playing jazz chords in a rock song. I think that’s it right there, how much you can get away with “overplaying” it without getting in the way. (It can even be a little out of tune and still sound good!)

Its character is distinctive too. To me it’s rain and concrete, pensively driving through downtown on a wet day. It doesn’t even matter what kind of song it is, that instrument alone makes it fit the setting.

It’s too bad our culture is so quick to relegate sounds like these to the “dated” file. I 10x{really} hated what they did to piano (both acoustic and electric) type sounds in the 80s, the decade where not only was 90% of all music output drum machines and synthesizers, but the same kinds of drum machines and synthesizers. Warmth of any kind was off limits.

Good thing Vic doesn’t have a LiveJournal. You won’t rat on me, moe_tha_katt, will you?