Lounge Lizard EP-3
ELECTRIC PIANO
Modeling an Electric Piano: How it works
The electric piano was invented by Harold Rhodes (1910-2000) during the forties when he was in the army. The first instruments he built were made of aircraft pieces and were intended to entertain army servicemen. It became a very popular instrument in jazz and rock, and has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years through it's extensive use by the world's top hip hop, R&B, and house producers.
The mechanism of the electric piano is, in fact, quite simple. A note played on the keyboard activates a hammer that hits a fork. The sound of that fork is then amplified by a magnetic coil pickup and sent to the output, very much like an electric guitar.
EP Character and Beyond
The original Rhodes™ pianos provided timbre and volume adjustments by letting you position the tines in relation to the pickups. These adjustments were at the heart of the electric piano's character as they controlled the harmonic content, attack, and decay of the sound—offering unique tone to each player. But there was a price for this flexibility, several painstaking hours with a screwdriver and incredible patience was needed to change the sound of an electric piano.
Suffer no more—With Lounge Lizard, the preset library provides a selection of thoroughly chosen Tine/Pickup configurations but you also have the ability to make those adjustments in real time via two simple controls: Distance and Symmetry.
But it doesn't end there, since controls are provided for the various electromechanical components, Lounge Lizard can be pushed far beyond hardware equivalents, opening up a completely new realm of sonic posibility!
What's more, since the interaction between the tine and pickup is quite unique, its effect can't be obtained with the filtering provided by samplers—limiting sampled solutions to one or two fixed configurations and bringing physical modeling at the forefront of the electric piano recreation.
