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Excellent point. That is why I use a preamp buffer as the first part of my fx chain and keep the cables between fx pedals as short as possible. I have 6 pedals on my board and I do notice a difference in tone if I bypass the preamp buffer.

Yup, adding stuff onto the circuit that was not intended to be there has tone changing consequences. You are correct, I did mean SPDT instead of SPST. For most of my fx pedals I have switched out my DPDT switches with Jack Deville Electronics click-less true bypass switches. It has a small circuit board attached that basically mutes it for a few milseconds when you hit the switch to avoid any clicking noise from turning the switch on.

I am not an electronics expert so I can't tell you exactly why they would sound different but I tried it and they do. Looking at my schematic it appears that the first example where I used a SPST switch it leaves the volume potentiometer in parallel with the harp and output. With the volume all the way up it would be like a short between the harp leads. With the volume all the way down it would be putting the resistance of the potentiometer in parallel with the harp output. Either way it would affect the signal and not give you the same sound as if you were hooked directly to the harp. Using a DPDT It completely bypasses the volume and tone circuit so that it sounds exactly the same as if you were hooked directly to the harp. This is how it's done in any "true bypass" switching fx pedals out there.

I had a similar issue once with a preamp that I had just rebuilt. I checked the PCB and all the caps were installed correctly so I started checking for continuity and found a bad solder joint. I re-soldered it and solved the problem. If you have the know how I would reccomend rebuilding the preamp. In my opinion that always improves the sound and you will likely fix the problem in the process.

Just watched the video. That is some good Rhodes playing. It is very hard to see in the video what preamp he has on that piano, but the vibrato speed has definitely be modded. It occurred to me after my last post that you may be able to increase the vibrato speed by just putting in a higher value potentiometer for the speed. I will try some experimenting and get back to you on this.

I have spent some time playing on a micro Korg and although the synth sounds are passable I was not able to get a good organ or regular instrument sound out of it. With your price range I think you could find a more versatile board that you would be able to get a larger variety of sounds out of. I have not played the Alesis Micron, but I have not been a fan of any Alesis board I have played (except for the Andromeda). Something like a Roland Juno might be better for you as you could get a larger variety of sounds out of it, it has a larger keyboard with (in my opinion) a better feel, and you could hook it up to a computer as a midi controller for limitless sound options.

I believe if you change the value of the capacitors for the vibrato circuit you can change the speed. They are either 5mFD or 8mFD depending on the year the preamp was made and are located next to the vibrato bulbs. If you look on the circuit board pic from vintage vibe for the preamp rebuild kit it points out the capacitors and says that the 8mFD caps will give you a slower pan. I believe most preamps have the 8mFD caps. I have rebuilt 3 different peterson preamps and only one had 5mFD caps and it came off of an early model Mark 1 Rhodes.

I am of the opinion that digital keyboards just don't cut it compared to using the original keyboards they are supposed to emulate. Based on the videos you posted I would say an organ or synth would work for you. If you have the room for it you can find a Hammond M3 organ for a couple hundred that will give you that real tonewheel organ sound and you can easliy add on a line out to run it through effects units like the wolfmother video. If you have to have something portable then digital may be the only way to go. In that case you may find the Nord Electro to be a better board for you than the Korg CX3. It has a pretty good sounding organ, but also includeds other vintage keyboard sounds as well. If you want to get that sound that Jack White was getting on the Icky Thump video you will need a synthesizer. He is playing a Moog Little Phatty which is an excellent analog synth. If you are looking for a good synth sound analog is always going to be best and in my opinion Moog is the only way to go.

Believe me I know it. I am on this forum way too often and rarely miss a new post. My point was that someone who just found the site and is looking to sell a rhodes is probably just going to browse through the buying section.

Michael,

If you want your post to be seen by someone selling a Rhodes you would need to post it in the "Buying" section as I cannot imagine anyone who wants to sell their Rhodes is looking in the "Selling" section to find a buyer for their Rhodes. Just because you post in the same section as people trying to sell their Rhodes does not mean that they are going to look at your post.

After reading this I just had to check it out and the listing still implies that it was used in the movie. I was not surprised to see that there is only 4 hours left on the auction and 0 bids. If I had almost $3,000 to spend on a Rhodes I would just spend a little extra and get a new one.

I listened to all 3 and thought Seven Reasons was the real Rhodes. I think the only reason some people thought All About You was a the real Rhodes is because the way it sits in the mix you cannot quite hear all the nuiances of the sound. I would be interested to hear a version of Seven Reasons with the Nord so that we can really hear the difference between the real Rhodes and the Nord. I think it would be more obvious than you would expect because the Rhodes is really out front in that song, unlike the others where it sits more in the back in the mix.

I would not charge anything for the cabinet as I will just be happy to see it get used instead of having to throw it away. I am not too sure what I want for the speakers. I will check to make sure they all work and get back to you on that. Let me know what your zipcode is and I will find out the cost to ship the cabinet with speakers and let you know what the total would be.

I have a totally stripped down peterson model cabinet that I need to get rid of. It has no tolex, but does have the grill cloth with some slight tears in it. I do have the speakers for it that I could throw in for a price, but no amp or power supply. I would not want any money for the cabinet, just pay for shipping, which could be kind of pricey as I am in the Seattle area.

Things are not too bad here in Seattle. The most expensive on on CL is a stage 88 for $1000, but there is also a very clean looking stage 73 for $600, and a couple other stage and suitcase pianos in between that range. The prices are a bit higher than I have seen in the past or paid (I got at suitcase 73 for $400 and a suitcase 88 for $300). Hammonds here are still priced pretty low, although I did recently see an M100 for $500, but most of the M and L models I have seen lately go for $100 - $200. Of course you still cant find a B3, C3, A100 or any other comparable model for less than $3000.

Mike,

I have exactly what you are looking for just laying around in my garage. They have a few scratches, but are otherwise in great shape. Let me knwo if you are intersted.

Im not too sure if they will work for you or not, but I have 4 extra speaker from a suitcase amplifier that I could sell you if you are interested. I will check the ratings on them later today and see if they are 8ohm speakers.

Ha ha, bjammerz you beat me to it by a couple minutes, although in my picture you can see the difference in the types of knobs used.

The knobs we are talking about are the cone shaped knobs that were found only on earlier suitcases (pre 1974). I bought one that was missing 1 of the knobs and exact replacement knobs are almost impossible to find. I tried a replacement from vintage vibe, but it did not match the other knobs (see the picture below). I saw a preamp on eaby with the knobs I was looking for so I bought it just for one knob with the intent on selling the other knobs and the preamp to get most of my money back.  I do have one of the cone shaped knobs left if anyone is interested I will sell it for $30. For the preamp I am asking $100. It does come with one knob and does not include the 4 pin cable.

http://s222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/?action=view&current=DSCF1612.jpg" target="_blank">http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/DSCF1612.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket">

I agree with bjammerz about the amp troubles. After my first preamp rebuild I plugged into the amp and turned on the vibrato to discover that the right side was much quieter than the left. I investigated and found the amp was about to die and I had to rebuild it. You can test both channels on a suitcase amp withoug a preamp by plugging into the channel 1 &  2 1/4" jacks on the amp. I usually use the stereo outputs on a mixer, hit a chord, then pan back and forth to see if both channels are working good.

I actually have a spare suitcase preamp. I bought it just for the old style knobs it had on it. I recently rebuilt so it works great, and I was planning on selling it. It comes with the nameplate, but no knobs. It is an older style preamp and does not have the effects loop, but you could very easily add one on if you wanted to, or I could add one on for you if needed. If you are interested let me know.

I read your post about the different logo placement and actually went out and checked my 2 suitcase pianos. The one from Early 1974 only has a logo on the amp, but the late 1975 model has the logo on the piano and amp. Between the logo design, logo placement, hammers, harp supports, dampers, pedestal felts, case hardware, and case design there is actually quite a big difference between the 2 pianos despite being so close in age.

Do you have the lid for the piano? I would be interested in that.

I don't personally have any experience with the dyno or other aftermarket preamps, but I do know that most can be installed without making any permanent changes to the piano. Some preamps install in place of the existing controls, and others come with their own namerail and they are all  simple to install. I personally like the preamps on the suitcase pianos, and I have heard good things about the Stage Vibe from VintageVibe.com which is based off of the earlier suitcase preamps and should get you that classic Rhodes vibrato sound.

Those pedestal felts look pretty dirty. It certainly couldnt hurt to replace them (and it is not that hard to do). It is hard to say wether or not that is your only problem. It could also be that due to the wood expanding over time, the key bushings are now too tight on the guide pins and that is causing some binding that is preventing your key from coming back up. If that is the case you might want to try easing the bushings (gently expanding the hole) and/or lubing the guide pins.

Glad to hear everything worked as expected. Enjoy

That looks correct to me. I am not too sure about the popping noise. With the similar bypass switch i did for my suitcase I get a little click sound when I switch over, but it is pretty minimal.

I tried a similar modification to a suitcase piano where I wanted a switch to bypass the effects loop. I did find that a spdt did not work as it left the effects in parallel with the output instead of completely bypassing them. I believe you may have the same problem using a spdt for your purposes. Below are 2 modified schematics to illustrate my point.

On this one you can see part of the volume pot is in parallel with the output
http://s222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/?action=view&current=spdt1stage_schematic-gif.gif" target="_blank">http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/spdt1stage_schematic-gif.gif" border="0" alt="spdt stage schematic">

On this one the tone and volume controls are completely bypassed, but the ground is still connected.
http://s222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/?action=view&current=dpdtstage_schematic-gif.gif" target="_blank">http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd182/billulsund/dpdtstage_schematic-gif.gif" border="0" alt="dpdt stage schematic">

Mike,

Congratulations on winning the auction. If you got the one that just went today for $154 you may find that one of the channels is blown (and unforutnately expensive to fix or replace) as the listing states that they could not get any sound on jack#2. On a suitcase piano the preamp is installed into the namerail on the piano. If you do not already have one you will need a suitcase preamp to get the suitcase tone controls and vibrato. I do have an extra preamp that I am in the process of rebuilding and was planning on selling when I am done so let me know if you need one.

I am not sure about the difference in a stage and suitcase sustain pedal rod. It is a pretty simple mechanism so I would imagine you can line it up and figure it out once you get the amp. Underneath a suitcase piano there are 2  round metal feet that line up with cups on the top of the amp to make sure it stays in place and that the damper pedal hole lines up, so you may need to install something on the bottom of the piano to make sure it stays lined up once you get the damper rod working.

The 2 inputs on the suitcase are for the right and left channel and work as an input or an output . Whatever is plugged into these jacks will not be affected by the preamp on the piano.

There is a headphone out on the amp, and both channels on that should work regardless of wether or not a channel is blown on the amp.

I order all my Rhodes parts from vintage vibe.com as they have a good website, the prices are the similar to most other retailers, and they always get my items shipped to me quickly.

Good luck, and if you have any questions feel free to shoot me a message.

I have found that like a Rhodes the Wurlitzer electronic pianos can be set up differently to get a different tone. Granted, it it not nearly as easy to do any of the adjustments on the Wurlitzer as it is on a Rhodes. You can loosen the reed and slide it a bit closer to the pickup to get a bit more bite (unfortunately that will also change the pitch slightly and it is a real pain to re-tune the reeds). The hammers can also become grooved an worn and that will affect the tone. You can also adjust the strikeline to affect the tone as well (see the vintage vibe youtube channel for more details). From what I understand the action mechanism and reeds are the same for the 200 and 200A so I would think that with the proper set up you could get them to sound the same.

Woohoo! I won the auction. Once I get the preamp I will have a couple extra of the very hard to find cone shaped concentric knobs. If anyone is interested, send me a message.

haha yeah, I saw your post and figued id give it a shot. Not too long left on the auction. If I win ill see if anyone here wants the knobs I dont need.  

I am currently bidding on the suitcase preamp that is on ebay right now and was wondering if anyone on these boards is bidding against me. I really just want the knobs and plan to rebuild and re-sell the preamp after I win. I was just wondering if the person bidding against me is on here so we can try to work something out rather than bid the price on this thing much higher.

thanks fred, I totally forgot that the bottom of the case for the stage is thicker than the suitcase. If you really wanted to put legs on it you would have to find a stage case to put your suitcase guts in. I think there is an empty stage case on ebay right now for $100

I have a suitcase that I use as like a stage piano. It had a dead suitcase amp that I took apart and gutted to use as a sustain pedal/stand (unfortunately it does not fold up nice and small, but is reasonably light and easy to carry). You can use a stage sustain pedal ($120) with the suitcase sustain rod from vintage vibe (about $55). If you want to make it just like the stage you would need to change out the suitcase preamp with a passive stage preamp, but I rather like the vibrato on the stage preamp and found that vintage vibe has a really cool suitcase cheek block power supply ($115) that powers the suitcase preamp and gives you stereo outputs. You just put it where your existing left cheek block is and it requires no modification to the piano. Then the only thing you would need is a stand, or you could put some lef flanges and find some legs for it. All in all to do it and keep the suitcase preamp you would need to spend about $350 (depending on the stand), or you can just try find a cheap parts stage piano.

Yeah, I saw this one too and just couldn't help but think that after spending as much as he did to get it to sound that good the least he could to would be to spend some time cleaning up the tolex and grill cloth. He could even replace the latches and corner pieces at minimal cost. As bad as it looks I cannot see anyone paying $4000 for it no matter how good it sounds.

This is in regards to Spookyman's comment.

In my previous comment I did not mean it to sound like the prodigy did not stay in tune well. Once it had sufficient warm up time I would have to fine tune it to my organ and then it would usually stay in tune for the remainder of my playing, but I always had to do that fine tuning adjustment after warming it up. With the Little Phatty I will fire it up, let it warm up for 5 minutes and it is usually already in tune and rarely needs any fine tuning adjustments at all.

Mahavishnu Orchestra, off of the album "Birds of FIre" the intro for song "Miles Beyond" played by Jan Hammer is the first song I can recall listening to that really made me fall in love with the Rhodes sound.

I recently bought a Little Phatty (christmas present to myself) and I have been very pleased with it. I had previously spent some time playing on a Prodigy and I did find the Phatty stays in tune much better. You can manually tune it like the old synths, but it also has an auto-tune function that keeps it in tune quite well. Most of the time I will just leave it on Auto-tune and will rarely have to touch it. Every once in a while I will notice it is a bit off (usually when I just fire it up) so I put it on manual tune, tune it by ear to my hammond, and it will stay in tune for the remainder of my playing. It definitely stays in tune far better than the Prodigy ever did.

I too was very glad to see Herbie behind a rhodes once again. I saw him in concert a year or so ago and he was playing what appeared to be a midi board running through a computer. He kept messing with the computer between songs. In my opinion the sounds he was using were very cheesy. The playing was great, but the cheesy tone was driving me nuts. He might as well have been playing on a Casio. I kept thinking the whole time that he should be playing a rhodes instead.

I had a similar noise but I discovered as pianotuner Stevo said that the problem was the bottom of the dampers hitting the plastic hammer shank resulting in a clicking sound. Rather than do the tedious task of carefully adjusting each damper (the dampers all worked fine) I had a bunch of small extra felt pieces left over from re-felting the pedestals that I put each hammer shank where the damper was hitting it to get rid of that annoying click .

Here is a link to the web page I found that has instructions on how to fix the volume drop.

http://www.dairiki.org/HammondWiki/EliminatingThePercussionVolumeDrop

Congrats on your finds. It sounds like you got what you were looking for. I absolutely love the M3 and can reccomend a few worthwhile mods. If you want a grittier rock sound from the M3 there is a small potentiometer in the housing for the volume pedal. Just remove the small round plug to access it. You can turn it up to add more overdrive to the sound (don't get too crazy or you will go through alot of preamp tubes). I also like to fix the volume drop in the upper manual that occurs when you turn the percussion from soft to normal. There are plenty of instructions for that one out on the web. Enjoy your new organs, now I would assume you are in search of a good Leslie.

I was in the same boat as you. I wanted the B3 sound but at a budget of practically nothing. After months of looking on craigslist I found an M3 with a leslie 110 for $250. I love the organ and the sound was basically what I wanted (gotta have the percussion and the leslie) but was a real chore to gig with. I continued to look on craigslist because I am always looking for a good deal. A couple months later I came across a chopped M3 organ for $100. This organ was definitely a professional chop as it looks just like a chopped B3 (but smaller) and has partial foldback, 9 different preset buttons, a switch that turns off the percussion decay, a quick kill switch, and a switch to turn on a light for your feet. It is the most portable tonewheel organ I have ever seen. The moral of my story is to stay patient, keep looking and you will find what you want. In my personal opinion the M3 and M100 are the closest you can get to the B3 sound without paying more than $200. The leslie is also very important. I have yet to hear an emulator that I like. I reccomend the motion sound pro3x as the easiest to find, most portable, and cheapest leslie solution.

The best I could find is a picture of the circuit board with some of the values written on it from.

http://www.vintagevibe.com/misc/rhodes%20pre%20amp%20board%20pic.jpg

This is for the preamp rebuild kit you can get from Vintage Vibe. I bought the kit and it made my preamp sound much better. I have another rhodes that I made some preamp modifications to (different vibrato caps, vibrato LED, and vibrato/tremolo switch). For that one I used the above picture in conjunction with the schematic to come up with my plan of attack.

If you want a circuit diagram you will probably have to make your own.

I do that exact thing and play both a Rhodes and a Guitar through the same effects loop. The impedances are very similar so a switching box would work, but what I do is just use a small mixer and I am able to get the levels perfectly balanced. I also then run everything through a Boss RC50 looper and have a drum machine synced to the RC50 so the mixer is pretty essential for my setup.

I have an old laptop that I used to record with and when I put it on my friends 1978 MK1 88 suitcase there was a very noticible pop that would occur at regular intervals, but he is able to set all his effects pedals and loopers on there with no noticable interference

I recently purchased a suitcase 88 (it also has excellent action), but 7 different keys had major cigarette burns on them. It looked like someone set their smoke down on the keys and just forgot about it several different times. I was considering putting on new key caps, but I had heard that it is a lot of work so instead I tried sanding. I bought a $40 hand sander from Home Depot that came with several different grit levels of sandpaper and some buffing pads. I started with a rough grit paper and worked my way down to the fine grit until the burn marks were gone. I then buffed the keys and you can't tell the burns were ever there except for a couple keys where the burns were so bad the key caps were slightly cracked under the burn. I was worried the color would look different after sanding, but they blend right in. I do not notice any difference in the action, the piano looks great, and it was much cheaper and quicker than a key cap replacement.

Rob,

Thanks for the reply. I have been researching this all day and after reading your latest post have come to a similar conclusion. For the time and effort it would take me to put this together and the un-certainty of the results I am not as sold on this project as I was earlier (plus you make a great point about the speaker location on suitcase amps). I will probably be better off just using my power amp and floor monitors for now (or my working suitcase amp), and then somewhere down the line I may try this project or go back to the original plan of rebuilding the old amps. For the purposes of resale I imagine the piano is worth more with an original spec amplifier anyway.

Thanks Rob, that is exactly what I was looking for. Did you build these amps for your project? If so I was wondering how it turned out. The power supply circuit looks pretty simple, but I was wondering if you know  whether or not I can use the original Rhodes power supply. That would save some time and money. I will test the power supply to see if it will work as I believe it does provide a +-35v output. I think I will be ordering 2 of the PCBs for this amp today. It will be nice to have a more reliable amplifier. I was also wondering if you have any reccomendations on what drivers to use.