The Fender 'Rhodes' Rock Keyboard

Video Transcript

In this clip we're going to be talking about the electric piano and the different parts of the electric piano. Like we said before it's your basic piano keyboard, I mean that's the starting point for all of these you know. So there's always going to be a middle C and then octaves on it. This particular model is called a 73 because it's got 73 keys. So that's become kind of a standard. You'll see some electric piano kind of emulators that even have 73 keys. In fact the one that's sitting in this case right here has 73. Now this is really similar to a guitar the way that it's built. Let me actually show you what the inside of one of these looks like. You see the inside of it and every one of these pieces in here; you see the little copper pieces? Each one of those is like a little guitar pickup. So when you hit your note it sends that frequency, or it sends that, I don't know I'm not an expert on how pickups work, but it does the same thing that guitar pickups do. It sends the to your, you know to your output through your amp. Now it is just like a guitar. Put that back, there you go. It is just like a guitar in the sense that you have your volume control and you have a tone control. Which is basically a treble boost. So, you know you can use that just like a guitar amp. Sometimes you know, depending on how you have the gain set on your amp you can you know, use this as kind of like your lead channel. You know you might have it down here, and then pop it up so you can get, you know, so you cut through the mix of the whole band for your solos. And the tone does this exact same kind of thing. This is definitely a vintage instrument as you can hear from the crackles. You can hear it raises up the treble. Now this is a pretty bassy sounding instrument so it's a really mellow sounding kind of thing. So the treble is you know you're not always going to hear a ton of treble on it. But you get the basic idea. Let me get my effects back here. Now I have the effects on the top of the keyboard which, depending on how, you know you see people playing electric piano. Sometimes they'll have it on the bottom. Typically I actually do like to have them on the bottom because it's just like a guitar. So you can you know, pop them on and pop them off. But one of the nice things about here is, you know, like we talked about playing in a rock and roll context you can simplify a lot, right? So that leaves your left hand to you know, noodle with different, you know distortion type things, right? So, let's say we take the phaser here and we want to be manipulating that phaser during the part. So you know, you put it on. You know you can play with the controls of that where it's speeding it up and slowing it down as the parts going. That adds another layer of complexity to it. You know that's one of the things about rock and roll keyboards, is you can't, you know there's no rules in a sense. You know or there's rules, but they can be bent or broken. That's why you don't always have to play the left hand. You can play the top hand too, and, or just the top hand and be using the other one to get different effects. Because that's a whole different sound that you can't get, it's a whole other layer of sound that you don't get normally when you're playing in the solo context. You also have, like this Fender is plugged into this guitar amp down here. You have all the different controls associated with that guitar amp. It just has the same guitar cable that goes in and out, and then you can manipulate the tone of the electric piano through the amp itself as well. So you know there's a range of sounds that you can get. And one of the keys to getting good rock and roll keyboard sounds is, or playing good rock and roll, is the sounds you know. I mean you get a good sound, you get a big fat road sound and all you have to do is just go, you know it's just a simple part. And everybody's like, " that sounds pretty sweet!" So, you know put a lot of work up front to getting the right tones. Play with some different things. Play with some guitar effects, some differing amps, eq-ing the amp differently. You know, turning the treble up, or the treble down, or the bass up or down that kind of thing. And you know, make your sound your own.

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