Laptop for live Rhodes samples?

[fundikira]

Hello

I have a Rhodes Mk II Stage 73 electric piano. It is great, but its inconvenience, continual need for mainentance and occasional unreliability have caused me to consider a rhodes emulation.

I want to get as close to the sound of a real Rhodes as I can. But I also want to start getting into effects so that I can get some new and interesting sounds (I have never used effects on my Rhodes apart from a bit of overdrive on my Peavey Classic 30 guitar amp).

The new setup would be used almost exclusively for live gigs.

I read on the Rhodes Supersite that the Scarbee R. S. P. sample library contains sounds which are the closest you can get by far to a real rhodes. I also read that the MrRay Seventy Three V. S. T. plugin comes quite close as well. I have also heard that the new Nord Stage has great Rhodes sounds.

So at the moment, I am leaning towards buying a laptop and the Scarbee sample library. If I did that then I would probably buy the Scarbee Vintage Keyboard FX plugin as well. I also read about something called Receptor, which sounds pretty cool, but I don't fully understand it or know if it would be useful to me.

Pretty much all I would want to do is play the Scarbee samples live using my controller keyboard (Kurzweil PC2x) and experiment with different effects on the computer. At the moment I do a little bit of MIDI sequencing on my home computer using the PC2x just for the purposes of seeing how things sound before I take them in to real musicians; I don't record audio or anything because my computer is pretty old and not very fast. I would like to continue doing that, but apart from that I'm not really that keen to get into full-on professional recording and sequencing etc.

Can anybody tell me how I go about acheiving this; what I should buy; how I should set it all up, etc? Or could you point me in the direction or a resource which would explain all this to someone who hasn't got much of a clue? Also, if you think I am heading in the wrong direction re. soft-synths, and think that I should get a Nord or Nord Rack and some effects pedals etc. please let me know.

Thankyou in advance for any feedback.

[dewdman42]

I'm going through a similar conversion right now. This is the wave of the future.

I have the Nord Electro (going to sell it)

I have the S90 (going to sell it)

both of those have great EP's

In the software domain, the first thing you need to get is a product called Brainspawn Forte (www.brainspawn.com). This is the best live gigging host I have been able to find for this type of application. Its about a hundred bucks or so.

For an EP...you found out a lot of good info already. I have yet to try the Scarbee stuff, so I can't comment. I have heard good things about it also. There is also Lounge Lizard. The nice thing about Lounge Lizard is that it does not use any samples. So it loads instantly and does not take any space on your HD. Some people really like it.

There is the NI elektrik product. I don't care for it.

The Ray73 you mention, I still have to try out. The nice thing about that one is that its totally FREE! I doubt it will be quite as good as either Lounge Lizard or Scarbee though.

In any case, I highly reccomend a laptop based gigging rig. I'm selling all my keyboards now to go that way. I got the korg plugin which as an M1 and wavestation in it. That, together with B4 for organ, Lounge lizard for EP, minimonsta for killer analog synth and then a wide collection of freely available soundfonts on the net for piano and other things....I'm done. The rig sounds absolutely killer and its cake to haul around.