This helped produce the sound of the 60s & 70s

An invention of Harold Rhodes, who used piano teaching as a recovery tool for injured servicemen during WWII, this device went from being a technical curio to a leading contributor to 60s and 70s popular music.

Rather than being a traditional piano, the Rhodes uses the piano keyboard to strike “tines” or tuning forks that vibrated next to a series of guitar-like pickups, which generated the distinctive sound of the Rhodes through an amplifier.

After his company was purchased by guitar maker Fender in 1959, a cutdown version of the device, call the Piano Bass, was produced and gained favour with some musicians, most famously Ray Manzarek from The Doors. But the Rhodes itself went on to great favour with musicians as diverse as Billy Preston (who among other things played with The Beatles). Herbie Hancock (who started out playing as sideman with Miles Davis) was a great proponent of the Rhodes, but most famous of all was Stevie Wonder, whose most famous songs of the 1970s all tended to be centred around his Rhodes Piano.

After corporate mismanagement and the rise of digital synthesisers, Rhodes was sold to Roland in 1987, but it’s name, and importantly, sound, lives on in a variety of ways.