Harold Rhodes

Harold Rhodes (Los Angeles, 1910) was an American piano pedagogue and instrument designer, best known for the electric piano that bears his name. His early training was in science, and he completed architecture studies at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School. Around 1930 he founded the Harold Rhodes School of Popular Piano, devoted to teaching popular piano.

During the Second World War he taught piano to other servicemen and, afterwards, to hospital patients. To that end he built the Air Corps Piano in 1942, a 29-note instrument that could be played in bed and that resembled a large toy piano. Instead of strings it used flattened aluminium bars, taken from aircraft scrap and arranged like the keys of a xylophone. Thousands of units were manufactured for the Army Air Corps hospitals. Around 1947, by then in California, he developed the three-octave Pre-Piano from that idea, fitted with electrostatic pickups, which was sold commercially for two years.

Around 1956, in partnership with the guitar maker Leo Fender, whose only direct result was the Rhodes Piano Bass (sold between 1960 and 1980), Rhodes began designing the electric piano that carries his name. Its hammers strike thin steel tines that are electromagnetically amplified and attached to tone bars that add resonance. Between 1965 and 1986 several models were manufactured in Santa Ana and later in Fullerton, California, first as Rhodes Keyboard Instruments and, until 1974-1975, as Fender-Rhodes. After CBS Musical Instruments bought the company in 1965, production came under that firm.

His legacy endures in the instrument's use in rock and jazz-rock, and in the digital samples that imitate its sound. In 1997 he received a Grammy for his work in music education and for the invention of the electric piano, an instrument that had been planned for re-release in 2001.