The Faux-Rhodes: Inspiration

Some of what follows made it to Facebook a while back, but I thought I'd lay out the whole story of the Faux-Rhodes here.

In college, my friend Sean and I liberated an old Fender Rhodes Mark 1 Stage 73 from its watery hell in the leaky basement of the old gymnasium where we practiced. We cleaned it up, tuned it up, put a platform on top for a second keyboard, put casters on one end, and hauled it to gigs. It was an awkward beast, easily weighing 75 lbs and just big enough to be difficult to pick up. We didn't have the chrome legs for it, so Sean graciously sacrificed an old table he had lying around. The piano graduated from the table to a pair of sawhorses when I moved it home. After college & grad school, I still had the thing, on sawhorses, in my basement in Colorado. Thanks to the early (and much funner) days of eBay, I found a replacement plastic tine cover and the legs and pedal, replaced all the hammer tips, tuned it, replaced felts, and lubricated the action. It played great. I loved it. I moved it from Idaho to Colorado and then New Mexico.

There were some problems with it, though. First, it was a real pain to move--heavy, bulky, cumbersome, didn't fit easily into the backseat of my Civic. Second, the pre-amp was weak. It's no wonder the "classic" set ups paired the Rhodes with some monster amp like a Fender Twin Reverb or a Bassman. Third, it only did one thing--play Rhodes. And it was not lost on me that the Roland FP-3 I had at the time had a nearly identical tone (and bark if you dug into it). Apparently, the sampled Rhodes-es had caught up with the actual Rhodes, and I ended up selling the beast to some guys who drove from Phoenix to Los Alamos to pick it up.

I still liked the idea of the Rhodes, though--a cool keyboard in its own beefy road case. I'd been thinking of a fairly lightweight, but rugged, box for my keyboards (Roland RS-70 synth and the aforementioned FP-3) for a while. After some time off from bands and gigs, and after selling the FP-3 to a budding piano student, I ended up getting a Casio Privia PX-3 to gig with in no small part due to the "EPianoPure" patch which sounds just like a Rhodes (but the PX-3 is the antithesis of the Rhodes with respect to weight (24 lbs vs 100 lbs) and functionality (250 patches vs 1 sound)). However, I was a bit concerned with the durability of the lightweight plastic case, especially the flimsy lip on the front. I set out to build a plywood case to protect and enhance the appearance. I wanted room in the case for the PX-3, the cords, the power adapter, and some foam padding. I wanted to be able to install and remove the piano to/from the box easily, but I wanted a tight fit. Finally, I wanted a clean look that would hide the back of the piano (and the mess of cords) on stage. Hence the red Faux-Rhodes, which is shown in the cover picture for Big A's blog.

In my next post I'll go through construction details and post some pictures from the process. Stay tuned...