Prepared Rhodes
It's a real Rhodes that is prepared as John Cage and others prepared an acoustic piano, that means you insert springs, plastic tubes, pins, etc., all kinds of objects inside the piano. These objects when touching the strings or the tines change the sound of each key played. All the notes can be radically different from each other and often you don't even recognize the original sound. You get an instrument that is much more percussive in nature.
Even if there are some clean sounds, this is a "dirty" instrument, when you put things inside an electric piano, a lot of things happen sonically, like strange vibrations and resonance between objects and tines. Even the release of the key produces artefacts on notes. All sounds have their natural decay, none is cut or looped.
Sounds range from clean percussive to edgy tones and the set covers a lot of musical and sonic ground, it may be useful in various styles of music.
Also included are patches simply made from one sound mapped across the keyboard and you can create your own. These make fun semituned percussion instruments. Their number vary according to each specific format. Moreover, as NI Battery and Kontakt have unique features, there are additional patches using these features for each.
Digitally recorded directly in a Tascam DA-88. Every note was sampled and almost every note has multiple velocity layers (from 2 to 6, average 4). There are 367 mono samples as the actual instrument is.
There are 2 main programs that emulate the actual instrument where each key has a different sound. The first one covers 72 keys, the second one 52 keys. Each key has a unique sound with up to 6 velocity layers. The sample set size is 63,2 MB.
Every note was prepared by Maxime de La Rochefoucauld who is also internationally known as a composer and a builder of mechanical musical automatons: http://www.cooptel.qc.ca/~maxime/
Performance, preparation of samples and programs: Zvon.
- Wav
- Soundfont
- NI Battery 3
- NI Kontakt 3 (full version, not the player)
