studio session, rhodes sounded like a crap motif

[SoulgMusic]

a total peeve of mine,
an engineer convinced me to leave my janus set up at home, just to direct Inject into a "nice compressor".  I was horrified after a whole day spent at the studio. Every track sounded like i was playing a shitty Motif or fantom.  no definition in the lower register, and over expression in the upper. i was this close to just ripping of the harp cover and back the tines out to fundamental but at that point i could care less about the tracks. i didnt want to sacrifice my perfect voice for my amps. i couldnt believe i was dumb enough to leave my janus, or even my silverface twin reverb back at home. Ive learned my lesson.

anyone else come across the same issue?

[andi85]

Yes! It happened at the very beginning of my affiliation with the Rhodes, so much of it was owed to my lacking knowledge and experience.

The first recording with my Rhodes went desastrous, except for one track. The studio didn't have an extra room for me, the Rhodes and the amp (or the engineer didn't want to...), so I went direct through a BBE 100X. However, my Rhodes was set up pretty tame, so I hardly got any dynamic response out of it and cranked the treble on the BBE to get barely anything. The result was horrible, almost like a fake DX patch, except on one quiet track. I had to back off the treble on that one due to the tremendous noise floor. That track resulted in the nice one

Then the engineer ran a chorus plug-in over the Rhodes tracks, which actually sounds lush and smooth on "the nice track", but pretty cheap with the over-cranked treble.

So... yes, that day I learned my lessons, too.

[Rob A]

Don't blame going direct--there's a world of excellent sounds possible with no amp. Blaming the lame engineer is okay though.

[keysandslots]

I always go direct, no issues.  In fact, it sounds better than any amp I've tried.

Randy

[Ben Bove]

The problem is - think of an electric guitar going through no amp.  plugged direct in to a mixing board no effects no sweetening.  Pretty thin and lame, no?

The rhodes is no different.  If you're looking for a beefed up sound, you need to have some kind of preamp to make the thing sing.  Otherwise it comes out sounding flat as-is.

The good thing though - is you can easily add this in after.  a cheap and common way would be to load an AmpliTube plug-in amp onto the Rhodes track, and you get a faux instant amp.  Another way though I haven't tried this, would be to send the Rhodes track to your janus preamp input, then record line out back into the mixer... which would basically "effects loop" in the Janus system.

you can basically post-add in the necessary amp boost.  Adding reverb and EQ would help very much as well.

[michaeltristan]

You might want to try something like a tube preamp.  Spice up that signal!!  I have a rackmount Speakeasy Vintage suitcase preamp and love the thing.  The guy I bought it from used it to record his record.  Geno Young is his name.  He said he went from the Rhodes to the tube preamp into his mixer.  The results were very nice.  Sounded very similar to a twin reverb.  Probably because Speakeasy uses a very similar pre-amp circut as Blackface Twins.  But there stil has to be something said for the way speakers effect the sound.... but what a pain to mike a speaker in the studio...

A neat thing would to build a speaker enclosure designed for recording.  Put a nice speaker in it with a tube amp..... yeah... tubes rule, at least in my world.

[Spookyman]

Like bjammerz...it depends so much what kind of sound you want to achieve. Sometimes, a "straight" sound, without effect is the way to go. In other situations, i'm using some effect pedals (phaser, stereo tremolo, EQ, overdrive, etc...) to spice up the basic sound.

The most important thing in recording is to listen to the sound of your Rhodes in the mix with the other instruments, then mute all the other instruments, again the whole mix, until the sound of your Rhodes is ok for you.

The first recording i made with my Rhodes was not so good too...you can do A LOT with a good preamp, a compressor and an EQ, in other words with a complete channel strip ! It's really worth the try.

[bobfridzema]

I think you can't blame bad sound on going direct or not. I personally prefer a tube amp sound, but my rhodeses (what's the plural for rhodes?) sound good going direct too.
It's a matter of EQing it to get your sound, and maybe compression and reverb.
SoulgMusic, it sounds like your rhodes was compressed way too much, and eq'd to sound really thin. That's a fault of the engineer, but it's also your responsibility to check that. Playing your rhodes direct, and leaving all eq  at 12'0 clock should still make for a decent rhodes sound....

[andi85]

I think the main difficulty with going direct is being dependent on the sound crew and on the outboard gear.

i just had a very nice gig with my Rhodes DIed upon request by the sound people. It sounded great, and I guess that resulted from the combination of a freshly tuned and voiced Rhodes, a very good DI (BSS AR-133), a great sound system, and above all, people on the desk who knew what they're doing.

If you use your amp and know how to make it sound right, there's less chance for somebody else to mess up the sound than if you're taking the "raw" signal.