Dream Machine Devine Machines’ OTR 88 Electric Piano Standalone, VST, RTAS, AU Mac PC $359.09 electronic delivery with additional payment plans. Words by Jeff ‘Madjef’ Taylor
My first instrument ever was a 1970’s Mark I Stage 73 Fender Rhodes piano. There are two Things that I remember most about that instrument. It had that amazingly warm Fender Rhodes sound and it was heavy, very heavy. The first song I ever learned to play was Stevie Wonders “You are the Sunshine of my Life”. Stevie really got me with that song and I practiced it for hours. Years later I would load this piano into my car and take it to gigs, causing severe back pain. It was a problem that I continue to grapple with years later. In those days I convinced myself that it was worth the trouble- mainly because I didn’t have a choice. If I was recording R&B or Jazz it had to be a real Rhodes since nothing else would do. After seeing footage of guitarists like Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Pete Townsend coaxing amazing and glorious sounds out of their pieces with the help of stomp boxes, I was soon mimicking these guitar greats with my own cheap stomp boxes. One day I decided to feed the sound from the Rhodes into the stomp box, hitting it with distortion, phase, and flange. The instrument went beyond that one sound and became a twisted orchestra of colors- big phat and beautiful. During the synth revolution in the 80’s and early 90’s , I eventually went along with the masses in believing that the sound of the Rhodes could be captured in synthesis. I stored the instrument away in the corner of the basement. I tried many synths that promised a true Rhodes sound and recorded on several projects with emulations of the real thing. I longed for that true analog phatness. The sound of a 70’s Rhodes piano in its true vintage nature was forever etched in my mind. Eventually, thanks to the emergence of Neo Soul that sound became popular again and I was again lugging and recording the beloved Stage 73. It never occurred to me that anyone would be able to emulate the sound enough to please me until now. Designs on Divinity Nicolas Lacoumette and Efflam Le Bivic of Devine Machine, have managed to take the soft synth to the next level with the release of the Rhodes OTR88. Devine machine has decided that not only can you have your basic Rhodes 26 Producer’s Edge May-June 2009
tone, but you can also color the sound with a multitude of tweaking features, guitar stomp pedal type effects all in an eye popping and beautiful graphic interface. The stomp boxes in this soft synth are super sexy. I have had the chance to play around with the OTR88 for a couple of weeks and it is an amazing piece of software. Bringing together two things I love most, a true Rhodes sound and Stomp boxes. The OTR88 comes with a number of presets for you to select, each one sounds great but wait! It goes so much beyond that by allowing you to add stomp boxes in order to create one-of-a-kind sounds. You can chain up to 5 stomp box effects together, Just left click on the area where the pedals exist and you get a pop up menu asking which of the FXs you would like to insert, right click to remove. You never have to leave the window for anything, all the controls happen in the plug-in window. Each parameter on each stomp box can be controlled via midi control. The effects sound very nice out of the box with reverb pedals, delay, tremelo, phase and distortion to name a few. I loaded a preset called AM Funk, it had a wah wah pedal, distortion, phasor and tremolo. I played a chord, used my mouse on the wah and scrubbed back and forth to simulate a wah wah pedal. It worked flawlessly; there was so much control of the pedal at my fingertips, that I was able to actually play the wah wah pedal with the mouse. I then decided to assign the pedal to a midi controller, so I pressed the button for the midi section,