In the U.S., land of high-tech music gear and Guitar Centers in every city, noise-making equipment is plentiful, but Africa is a very different situation. “Equipment? In Africa?” laughs Rikki. “Forget it! There’s nothing there except that which lovers such as I bring them. There may now be a few enterprising Nigerians that have begun importing guitar strings and saxophone reeds and a few amps. There are then the enterprising promoters who import entire systems—for which they probably pay too much—but they’re few and far between. Those that do exist and are properly maintained are in high demand.”

That often meant Rikki had to bring a DIY spirit to producing Fela Kuti—going as far as, on one occasion, building the PA for an event from scratch: “I had flown two sound engineers to Lagos who had provided concise instructions to carpenters for the speaker cabs, monitors, et cetera. They had then returned to London, and some weeks later when the boxes were ready, we returned with all of the necessary contents and cabling, plus a mixing desk. As the boxes took inordinately longer than planned, we arrived the day before the first show, due to take place in Port Harcourt, some thousand kilometers from Lagos. Everything was shipped there and actually put together onstage. The moment of truth came when we connected everything together and powered up. It worked! Hallelujah! I’d been keeping a beady eye on the promoter, as we hadn’t yet been paid and saw him heading for the door. I asked where he was going and he told me, ‘To NEPA.’ NEPA was the Nigerian power company—commonly referred to as ‘Never Expect Power—Always.’ I asked why, and he explained that the technicians on duty there knew that we had a show that night, and if he didn’t go there and grease their palms, there’d be no juice for the show!”

Amidst this somewhat chaotic background, Fela Kuti himself was a picture of order, says Rikki: “Fela’s approach to performance was meticulous in every detail. Sound check involved him personally tuning every instrument himself. During the performance itself, heaven help any musician who strayed from the groove.

“A Fela concert in Nigeria was a wild experience. [There were] regular shows in Fela’s club, the Shrine, where he would arrive around 2:00 AM and play until dawn to packed and appreciative audiences. A Fela show outside would normally be in a stadium attended by twenty to fifty thousand and secured by an enthusiastic belt-wielding police force, though those being chased were pretty adept at avoiding getting cornered. The whole thing became a sort of surreal Afrobeat ballet. It was immensely amusing to watch and participate in—if you had the balls!—all taking place under the aegis of the chief priest and his high-energy music and volatile lyrics.”

Live or recorded, Fela’s musical creations had a carefully planned life cycle, with an end product and a quasi-political, radical spirit baked into the process. “Each Tuesday in the Shrine would be ‘Yabis Night,’ when Fela would discuss issues of the day with his devoted audience, using the occasion to air his forthright ideas. These ideas would, over a period of days and weeks, consolidate into lyrics and music. Fela would then come back to the Shrine in the afternoons to begin translating, with the full band and singers, his lyrical and musical ideas into a full-blown song. Once the song was ‘cooked,’ Fela would begin performing it during his shows. This might go on for some weeks, but as the underlying issue within the song could now be seen as ‘old news,’ Fela would tire of performing it. At this stage, he would go into the studio and record it, releasing it shortly thereafter. Following the recording, the song would never be performed again.”

Speaking with Rikki is a reminder that, far from our capitals of popular music, access to equipment and political opportunity taken for granted in the U.S. are far scarcer in Nigeria. It’s also a reminder that, as he is quick to observe, petroleum riches are not the nation’s greatest offering to the world.

“I have a thirty-five-year love affair with Africa that shows no sign of abating,” says Rikki. “I am amongst those who consider that Africa has a tremendous contribution to make in the world that we haven’t seen yet, above, beyond, and apart from the raw materials that they’ve been providing the world for a century or more.”

Peter Kirn edits the website createdigitalmusic.com.

In an age in which robotic vocals have become cliche, the most important thing to know about the talk box is that it’s not a vocoder. That’s not to say the ideas aren’t related. The vocoder models human speech as the combination of a carrier and a formant—the sound of your vocal cords, and the way in which the physical shape of your throat, nose, and mouth filter that sound. In vocoders, these are reproduced entirely via electronic means. The talk box uses the formant you already have: your mouth. A speaker attached to a tube directs the sound of an instrument into the performer’s mouth, then amplifies the sound by way of a mic and output. Move your mouth as you would when speaking, and your mouth becomes a low-tech, real-time filter for the sound.

The beauty of this system is that it is immediate and physical, a kind of cyborg technology, capable of modulating any sound. Whereas artists like Daft Punk are most closely associated today with talk boxes, its origins lie in the era before computers or robots, in artificial speech research and the explosion of experimentation with the sound of the guitar.

Bell Labs perhaps deserves credit for the first talk-box-style invention, the 1929 artificial larynx, which used a metallic vibrating reed as a stand-in for vocal cords. The artificial larynx was, of course, a medical remedy, so it required an opening called the stoma in the speaker’s throat—not a terribly convenient solution for a musician.

Musicians found they could simply get a speaker near the mouth, then mic the results so they could be amplified. By the 1930s, swing musician Alvino Rey was already changing the sound of guitars with a modified pedal steel guitar; Rey even worked with Gibson to produce their first electric guitar. As early as 1939, he wired a talk-box-style mic effect to create a “singing guitar”—a guitar sound with formants shaped by the mouth. To play up the novelty on variety shows, he even created a guitar puppet as a character to represent the anthropomorphic instrument and hid his wife behind a curtain to perform the modulation.

Nineteen thirty-nine also happens to be the year fiction writer and former radio operator Gilbert Wright invented his Sonovox. The Sonovox used speakers pressed into the throat to produce mechanical talking sounds, including the singing train in the Disney movie Dumbo, and stories like Sparky’s Magic Piano. With the mouth as filter, any sound could be made to “talk.”

The talk box caught on as a guitar effect in the ’70s, in songs like Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way.” Bob Heil had the foresight to add amplification to the effect, and made the Heil Talk Box the first commercial product—and the name stuck. You can still buy the Heil piece, though other models have come and gone. Because you need only a speaker, a mic, a filter, and some kind of tube or other connection, almost anyone can create a talk box—a recent viral YouTube video uses the Korg DS-10 handheld Nintendo game and a drinking straw. The one thing you can’t do is make a digital model. Real talk boxes require real mouths, though digital effects (including vocoders and vocoder-like effects such as the discontinued DigiTech Talker) have tried. That said, given the relatively predictable results of voice correction, the talk box is proof that ingenious thinking and real-world processing can yield endless variety.

Peter Kirn edits the website createdigitalmusic.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMDCjA9_-tM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGUH0C09l70

www.youtube.com/watch?v=36XMf29053I

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EIQxwotn3k

World War II may have given us the atom bomb, but it also contributed what Ray Charles would call “an atom bomb on the musical landscape.” Predating synths like the Moog, the Rhodes piano was the great keyboard instrument innovation of the twentieth century. Its history is intertwined with the history of jazz, and while jazz keyboard began on a borrowed European invention, the Rhodes was the first keyboard instrument jazz could call its own.

Harold Rhodes got his start as one of the first jazz theorists and teachers, instructing the likes of Lana Turner and Harpo Marx and hosting his own nationwide instructional radio show. But the basic idea for the Rhodes piano was born when an Army doctor asked Rhodes to soothe bedridden wounded soldiers by teaching them piano. Recycling airplane parts from B-17 bombers into handmade, laptop keyboards, Rhodes first employed the xylophone keys that would later ring inside his signature piano.

After the war, Rhodes worked on mass-manufacturing his pianos, and added the elements that give the Rhodes—and countless jazz records—their sound. The basic innovation was to solve the problem of tuning by turning the entire sound-making mechanism into a tuning fork. As with a conventional piano, the Rhodes has strings struck by hammers. In the Rhodes, these strings are steel wires called “tines,” tuned by coil spring. Harold Rhodes added a resonating tone bar behind each string. The combination of the string and bar acts like the two bars of a tuning fork. As with the electric guitar, the electronic amplification of the Rhodes piano gave it the gift of loudness and the timbre-shaping power of effects, changing music forever.

Ironically, it was jazz’s great trumpet player Miles Davis who may have had the deepest impact on the instrument. He insisted his musicians adopt the Rhodes and leave behind the history of the acoustic piano. Miles got Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea playing electric piano on his sessions. On the 1969 recording sessions for Bitches Brew, as many as three Rhodes pianos blend into new and distorted timbres, helmed by Chick Corea, Larry Young, and “Pharaoh’s Dance” composer and Rhodes innovator Joe Zawinul. The same year, the Beatles got an aggressive Rhodes injection from soul musician Billy Preston as they recorded “Get Back.” By 1973, the sound of the Rhodes found its way into the pages of Down Beat magazine, quite literally, on a four-song demo album by Herbie Hancock included with the magazine. From Stevie Wonder to Radiohead, countless artists have become Rhodes players.

Harold Rhodes died before he could finish his successor to the Rhodes, but he did rescue the trademark from Roland, clearing the way for a new, more modern Rhodes (rhodespiano.com). Software synth renditions face the challenge of an organic, electro-acoustic instrument. Some use recorded samples (Native Instruments’ Elektrik Piano), some physical models (Ableton’s Electric); Digidesign’s Velvet uses a combination of the two. But perhaps Harold Rhodes’s spirit is most alive in the renewed interest in the DIY instrument building he first tried to teach.

For more info on the Rhodes piano and its emulators, visit these links:

For background on Rhodes history.

The Harold B. Rhodes Music Foundation continues to support musiceducation in the U.S.

Native Instruments Elektrik Piano is typical of the sampled approach.

Applied Acoustics – Lounge Lizard uses physical modeling.

A Lounge Lizard-based instrument called Electric is part of Ableton Live Suite.

The Rhodes piano was re-released at Winter NAMM 2007, in a modeldescended from the Mark V.

Digidesign’s Velvet is a hybrid of sampling and physical modeling.

OTR-88 is a new physically modeled electric piano from Devine Machine with per-key adjustment.