Electric Pianos

Electric pianos - like the electric guitar - have been an essential part of popular music since the 1960s.

Early electric pianos share some other qualities with electric guitars - they aren’t true electric instruments, but modified acoustic instruments. The sound they make is produced mechanically, but instead of having a soundboard they use electromagnetic pickups and electronic amplification.

It was impractical for bands to carry an acoustic piano around with them to gigs, and the piano in the concert room of the ‘Dog & Duck’ was usually out of tune or completely unplayable. A portable piano with a responsive keyboard was needed.

Rhodes and Wurlitzer

The best known electric pianos to emerge from the 1960s were probably those made by Rhodes and Wurlitzer.

Rhodes Suitcase 73

Rhodes (a small company developing electric pianos) was bought up by Fender in 1959. This was not a good business move, and they produced very little until they got away from Fender in 1965. During this time, Wurlitzer (makers of cinema organs and jukeboxes) produced electric pianos based on technology that Rhodes had developed and held patents on. Rhodes and Wurlitzer instruments are very similar, although players usually prefer the sound of one or the other.

The sound is produced by using a mechanism similar to a grand piano. Each key on the keyboard operates a hammer ‘action’, but instead of the hammer hitting a string, it hits a tuned metal bar which is essentially a tuning fork. An electromagnetic pickup mounted close to the tuning fork converts the sound into an electrical signal, which is then amplified. The position of the pickup relative to the ‘tuning fork’ can be adjusted, changing the tonal qualities of the instrument.

Later refinements included the addition of a ‘tremolo’ or vibrato effect, which was eventually replaced with stereo chorus.

Classic tracks:

Anything by Supertramp, Pink Floyd (Animals - Dogs), The Doors - Riders on the Storm.

Hohner

Hohner are probably best known for their piano accordions and harmonicas, but during the 1970s they experimented with electric piano design.

The Hohner Pianet sounded very similar to the Rhodes pianos, but worked in a very different way. The sound was produced by a series of metal tongues - similar to the reeds found in an accordion. Instead of a piano hammer action, the Pianet used small flat rubber suckers, which ‘plucked’ the tongues when the keys were pressed, and damped them when the keys were released. This simple mechanism made the Pianet both lighter to carry and cheaper to produce than the Rhodes style instrument, although it lacked the ‘traditional piano feel’ of the Rhodes and Wurlitzer instruments .

A better known Hohner innovation was the Clavinet. Not strictly a piano, it was in fact an electric spinet, containing strings which sounded when touched by metal tangents under the keys.

The instrument had a unique sound, somewhere between an electric piano and a harpsichord. It was a predominant in black American funk music of the 1970s.

Classic Track - Stevie Wonder - Superstitious

Yamaha CP series

Although the Rhodes style electric pianos were relatively portable, they didn’t sound that much like a piano - mainly because of their stringless design.

In the mid 1970s, Yamaha produced a new instrument - the CP70 electric grand piano. This was essentially a very small, fairly lightweight grand piano which could be broken in half - the action & keyboard in one half and the frame and strings in the other.

Like the Rhodes piano before it, there was no soundboard, but it did have strings. Instead of the heavy electromagnetic pickups of the Rhodes, the CP70 used piezo pickups (similar to bridge pickups found in electro-acoustic guitars). As well as keeping the weight down, the piezo pickups produced a much brighter sound. This was almost like listening to a real grand piano.

The Yamaha CP80 was the same as the CP70, but had 80 notes rather than 70. A modern acoustic piano has 88 notes.

Yamaha CP80 in the playing position and split ready for transport

Classic tracks - anything by Genesis from the 1970s, Peter Gabriel (So - Lead a normal life)

Mellotron

The Mellotron (a.k.a. the Chamberlain and the Novatron) was one of the strangest and most innovative musical instruments of it’s time. The Mk1 Mellotron was originally produced as a special effects playback system for use in studios producing radio plays.

First apperaring in 1963 (long before digital audio and samplers) it was the first keyboard instrument to use the sound of real instruments, which was achieved by recording real instruments (string section, flutes, choirs etc) playing individual notes onto tape. 36 lengths of tape (each containing one note) were mounted on interchangable racks which fitted inside the Mellotron – one recorded note under each key. Pressing a key engaged the playback mechanism for that note, which could be played for a maximum of 8 seconds.

Novatron

Classic tracks - anything by Genesis from the 1970s, the Beatles ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (flutes); Led Zeppelin ‘Stairway to Heaven’ (flutes again); Nelly Furtado (Whoa Nelly - opening of ‘Turn out the Light’)