(b Los Angeles, 1910). American piano teacher and designer of the Rhodes electric piano. The son of a baker, his grounding was in the sciences and he took an architectural degree at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School. Around 1930 he established the Harold Rhodes School of Popular Piano. During World War II he taught the piano to fellow servicemen, and then to hospital patients. For this he built his 29-note Air Corps Piano (1942), which could be played in bed and resembled a large toy piano; it used scrap parts from aeroplanes, including lengths of flattened aluminium tubing, mounted like xylophone bars, instead of strings. Thousands were built for Air Corps Hospitals. By 1947, working in California, Rhodes had developed the idea in the three-octave Pre-Piano, with electrostatic pickups, which was marketed for two years.
While in partnership with guitar builder Leo Fender, the only direct result of which was the Rhodes Piano Bass (marketed 196080), from about 1956 Rhodes developed the electric piano that bears his name; hammers strike electromagnetically amplified thin steel wire tines, individually linked to steel tone bars that add resonance (see Electric piano, fig.2). Several models were manufactured by Rhodes Keyboard Instruments in Santa Ana and later in nearby Fullerton, California during 196586 (until 19745 as Fender-Rhodes), after CBS Musical Instruments took over Fender-Rhodes in 1965. An Electric Piano Classroom System was produced in the late 1960s. Although outdated, it is still popular with rock and jazz-rock musicians, and is recreated in sampled form on many digital pianos. The Chroma synthesizer and an electronic piano (1982) were taken over from the defunct ARP company. The company was bought by Roland in 1989, which marketed several sample-based digital pianos, synthesizers, and a drawbar organ in Los Angeles under the Rhodes name, before releasing the company to Harold Rhodes in the late 1990s for legal reasons. The innovative Rhodes Piano Method was initiated in 1990, and Rhodes received a Grammy award in 1997 in recognition of his achievements in music education, and also for the invention of his electric piano, which is set to be remarketed in 2001.
J.H.M. Goddijn: Groot elektronisch orgelboek (Deventer, 1975), 22632
D. Milano: Harold Rhodes: Pioneer of the Electric Piano, Contemporary Keyboard, iii/11 (1977), 810, 44 only
T. Rhea: The Pianos of Harold Rhodes, Contemporary Keyboard, iv/5 (1978), 62 only; repr. in The Art of Electronic Music, ed. T. Darter and G. Armbruster (New York, 1984), 224
M. Vail: The Rhodes Piano Bass and the Vox Continental: the Original Doors Keyboards, Keyboard, xvii/2 (1991), 10001
B. Carson: A Parade of Exotic Electric Pianos and Fellow Travellers, Keyboard, xix/12 (1993), 1416
HUGH DAVIES