Nord User Forum

[therulah]

Any suggestions on what hardware (pedals) I could buy to get my Electro 3 to sound like the Rhodes on Babylon Sisters? NI/Scarbee's Mark 1's Phaser effect comes pretty close ("Steal-a-Dame" preset) - I'd like to duplicate this. It's a stereo phaser/chorus sound, but sounds like an irregular pattern...

[shark]

Ask Donald how he did it. He's a total sound genius!;)

[therulah]

I FOUND THE ANSWER!!!! And, sure enough, the answer came from Donald himself in a Keyboard Magazine article from 2006:

SH: So what’s the secret formula for your trademark phasey Rhodes sound?

DF: The trademark is, first you try and find those little orange boxes, I forget what they’re called, and if you can’t find the little orange boxes [MXR Phase 90s] from the late sixties, and if you can’t get them you go get the big orange boxes from a slightly later period, and—

SH: Phase shifters—

DF: –they’re just phasers, that’s all they do, and you use two of them, so they’re stereo, and you keep ‘em on a slow pace, and that’s about it.

SH: Sometimes the effect is like you’ve got them on a trigger pedal–

DF: It’s all random.

SH: That’s cool. And on some of the tunes, obviously, the Rhodes is straight.

DF: Right. I like the phasers, because they even out the signal, for some tunes, especially if you want it to sound a little more like an organ tone, or you need to sustain things a certain way, with a kind of compression, they’re useful, it makes it less boring, because you’re hearing some modulation or something. It’s a nice sound.

SH: So the stereo thing, with the two of them, that’s the secret, ‘cuz you can hear it with the headphones for sure.

DF: Yeah, they modulate with each other—

SH: They’re not exactly locked in together, so you don’t get that predictable back and forth sweep.

DF: And it’s random, so it’s not like some kind of synthesizer. On the attack sometimes you get some random nice little whops.

SH: That’s why I though there might some kind of a wa pedal—

DF: No, no, it’s more often than not you’ll get some kind of interesting thing happen on the attack.

SH: That’s really cool.

DF: You gotta kind of whop the keyboard, too. [???]


And there you have it. Run the Nord right and left into two Phase 90 pedals. I hope it works... now I can start my Steely Dan cover band.

[shark]

Like I said the man's a genius. Wel done on your find.

[RedLeo]

DF: You gotta kind of whop the keyboard, too. [???]

Hit it hard, use plenty of gusto