The reason I love playing electric pianos rather than keyboards is that I'm actually making the sound rather than triggering a sample or a synthesized sound that is generated by a computer or oscillator.

As a songwriter, there is something deeply important about physically generating the vibrations that create music. Sitting at a real upright or grand piano you are connected with the music on a completely different level that if you are playing a digital keyboard.

An electric piano (like a Rhodes or Wurlitzer) works the same way, you hit keys that trigger hammers to hit tines (Rhodes) or reeds (Wurlitzer) that act like the strings on a piano. The tines/reeds are then amplified by pickups like you'd find on an electric guitar.

The thing is, once I played a Rhodes for a few years, I actually started to prefer it to an upright piano. You can overdrive a Rhodes to get an electric guitar-like effect. You can run it through effects pedals like reverb, distortion, or echo, or use the built in vibrato to get that classic Doors/Zeppelin keyboard sound.

Fender Rhodes Mark II Suitcase
Affectionatlely known as 'My Baby' this is my favorite keyboard. The 'suitcase' model sits on its own speaker cabinet with 4 x 10" solid state speakers, two facing me and two facing the audience (or the wall when it's in my studio). I bought this piano on eBay in 1999 for around $350 and then paid another $100 to have it shipped to NY. When it arrived I was a little disappointed. The owner had played it for me over the phone and it had sounded good, but two of the keys didn't work and the action on all the keys was different which made it very awkward to play.

I made a few calls and was extremely lucky to find a guy named Kent Raine (sp?) who was a Rhodes tech for Billie Joel and Bob James. I think Kent charged me $90 to completely overhaul the piano. He used a flashlight and recovered several missing parts that had fallen into the casing. He had me play a bunch of the keys and tell him which action I preferred and then he adjusted all the other keys to match the action. He also adjusted all the individual pickups so that the volume was even. This made all the difference in the world. The piano now sounded fantastic and played like a dream. It was obviously a labor of love, Kent has a tremendous enthusiasm for the instrument. I've only had to do two minor tune-ups in the 9 years since then.

The Rhodes has a lot of great features. It has a headphones jack and stereo line out jacks so that I can easily play late at night without waking the neighbors and also jack it into my breakout box and record it on my mac. It also has an effects loop so that I can daisy-chain a bunch of effects pedals and then run the final signal back through the suitcase speakers and its built-in vibrato.

When I moved in with my girlfriend (soon to be wife) a few years ago, I decided it was time for a present. I wanted an attractive electric piano for the living room, and I'd always wanted a Wurlitzer. I found someone down on Saint Marks Place in the East Village selling a Wurlitzer 206 Student Model.

Both Fender and Wurlitzer made an educational product line of 'Student Pianos'. The idea was that you could fill a classroom with these units and they would all collectively hook up to a master console. Each unit came with it's own pair of headphones with an attached microphone, and the player would have the option of listening to him/herself solo, listening to the entire ensemble, or playing through the speaker (presumably when 'called upon' by the teacher to play for the class..).

The educational models happened to come out in the heat of the 1970's and so they were designed in outlandish shapes and colors. (The picture of the green Rhodes piano that headlines this lens is the Rhodes, and the cream-colored piano above is the Wurlitzer 206 sitting in my living room). Later on when the pianos fell in popularity most of the schools sold off the Student Pianos. Most of the Teacher modules must have been discarded because I've only seen scattered pictures of them online and never seen one for sale.

I think I paid $650 for this piano and $50 plus tip for a guy with a van to help me move it. But what the craigslist ad didn't mention was that the guy selling it lived in a 5TH FLOOR WALK-UP! The other thing that I didn't know was that unlike my Rhodes suitcase, this piano does not separate from it's base, so it's really NOT portable. But I'd already ponied up for the van, so I soldiered up and carried it down the 5 flights.

The piano came with a funky music stand, and still had the whole headset mechanism intact. The headset and the attached microphone sound incredible, because they're 100% original analog components. Also they're finished in the greatest 70's brown faux-leather. The Wurlitzer sounds warmer and dirtier than the Rhodes. Though they are both solid state amplification systems, the Wurlitzer has more of the classic 'tube crunch' capability, perhaps because of the type of amplifier or speaker that was used. it's not as good for recording, but its perfect for playing old rock or blues songs when people come over, and fits perfectly in that niche by the bar..

Ok I have a very bad confession to make. I own a Hammond X77 organ & Leslie X77 rotary speaker, but about 5 years ago I had to send them to a home. Right now they're sitting in the basement of my parents house in Massachusetts (sob, sniffle).

In 1998 I had an overwhelming urge to have a real Hammond Organ and Leslie speaker. I found someone through the an online discussion group who sold me the organ and speaker and delivered them to my NY apartment for around $700 (looking back that was a pretty crazy deal considering the size of The Beast.)

Hammond Organs were originally designed to emulate the pipe organs in churches by using amplified tonewheels (very small rotating disks) to emulate the large pipes of a pipe organ. Pipe organ pipes were sized to produce particular pitches (The 32 foot long pipe would make the low A note in the scale, the 16 foot pipe would be an octave higher, and so on according to each harmonic). So the Hammond was design with drawbars that allowed the organist to assign a volume level to each 'pipe' to create a signature sound. They also added 'Percussion' to mimic the little bells and horns that were added to organs to enhance the choral effect. The most famous Hammonds like the B3 and the C3 were designed this way. The leslie speaker was designed with a motor that would spin the speaker inside the cabinet, presumably to mimic the giant reverb sound of playing in a large cathedral or concert hall. Instead of producing a true Sine wave like you'd get from a real pipe, the tonewheels & spinning leslie had a very distinctive sound that was quickly picked up by jazz/blues greats like Jimmy Smith, Booker T. Jones, Dr. Lonnie Smith, and Art Neville.

In addition to the market for church organs, Hammond saw a demand for organs to be used in theaters. The X77 came out in 1969 with all the bells and whistles they could possibly pack into it. The 'Percussion' features on this organ include all kinds of instruments like banjos, guitars, horns, and woodwinds. The most bizarre feature of this organ is that on the lower manual there is a device called an "Arpeggiator". The arpeggiator is a row of spinning columns about the width of my thumb and looks a lot like Georgi Laforge's visor from Star Trek TNG. If you finger a chord on the lower manual, you can then trigger the notes of the chord with the arpeggiator by running your thumb up and down and spinning the columns. It's not a very practical effect, but the wow factor is definitely there..

But the best part of the beat hands down is the giant Leslie Speaker that is finished in a beige and brown plaid. This speaker was so loud that I frequently got complaints from people waaay down the block about the noise. People had honestly thought that a church had moved in on the block and were wandering around trying to figure out where it was.

The Beast eventually just took up too much space and was way too loud to be practical, so when I moved out of this apartment, I had the movers put it in the back of my dad's truck and said a tearful goodbye. My advise would be that if you have a lot of room and not a lot of neighbors and have the opportunity to buy one of these, absolutely do it. But it's definitely not suitable for city livin'...

Anyway I look forward to the occasional long weekend when we go to see my folks and I can play The Beast.

Around 2000 I arrived home after a gig one night pretty drunk and did some dangerous impulse eBay shopping. A few days later a CordoVox CDX Combo Organ arrived at my place. We nicknamed this board "The Alien" because of its odd deep cream color and winged case similar to an old buick.

This portable organ seemed to go after all the traditional organ features (draw bars, percussion, rotary speaker) and to add a bunch of psychedelic 70's sounds with labels like Astro-Fuzz and Buzz Bass. There is also a Portamento feature which makes each note slide up or down from the last note you play.

All I can say about this organ is that it's DECKED OUT! There are lights right above the manuals, presumably so that you could play it in a darkened theatre sound pit or something, which are unbelievably cool when you just turn off the lights and start playing this thing. They built in some great effects like a repeater with a speed control for the many layers of percussion. The only downside is that for some strange reason they put the output jack on the BOTTOM of the organ, so you can't rest it on top of a Rhodes or another keyboard, it requires it's own stand. That's a MAJOR drawback. Nonetheless, if you see one of these in working order, BUY IT IMMEDIATELY. I think mine was around $350 and I can't imagine it not being a serious collectors item in the near future. Plus they are outrageously fun to play even for friends who don't have great piano skills.