For the past month, I've been increasingly obsessed with finding a Rhodes piano sound that I like. All the freebies have sounded thin and unresponsive to me. I think I'll still eventually end up with Lounge Lizard or Velvet, but tonight, I built a sound that pleases me a hell of a lot.
I'm not the first, or the thousandth, to think about layering different instruments, but this combination works amazingly well for me. And it's all free.
Mix, in roughly equal parts:
1. Yannleo's new VST using the Rhodes patch, here: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=190332
I've fooled around with turning the various effects on and off, and like most of the variations.
2. MDA's ePiano, here: http://www.pluginspot.com/English/frames.html
I slowed down the tremolo, and fiddled with the distortion to get a tone I like. Low, but not off, distortion sounds good to me.
3. LearJeff's JRhodes3, here: http://learjeff.net/sf/sf.html
It's an .sf2, and I use SynthFont to play it.
All together they sound, to my ears, rich and juicy, wonderfully clear and stereophonic, and very musical. Much more so than any of them alone. Part of the reason, I think, is that they likely have different velocity layers, so the sound changes much more dynamically in combination than any single one does.
The really delightful part is that I can get that sweet honking distortion at higher velocities, without it sounding harsh.
Only about a 10% CPU hit on my AthlonXP 3200 rig in Reaper.
Now all I gotta do is learn how to play my keyboard better, and I'll seriously rock out on this tone.
Lemme know how it sounds to you if you decide to mess with this. I'd love to hear some suggestions on how to make it better. I'll probably experiment with adding or substituting some of the WusikStation patches later this week, but my ears are pretty burnt up right now, after four hours of fooling around...
Take care,
GreyLion
