Has anyone bought the Rhodes V8 plugin? Just wondering how it compares to Lounge Lizzard which seems to be the EP of choice for a lot of folk.
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I just tested it, sounds very good, but a lot of Samples.
But is uses about 2GB of memory, seems no stream from disk.
I prefer Lounge Lizard. It’s modeled (not sampled) and has light CPU usage.
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I further checked the Rhodes VST and memory usage does moderate increase when you load that plugin in multiple rackspaces.
Do you have any custom presets that you’ve created to get the sound you prefer or are you using factory presets? I’m using Pianoteq for E-Pianos but I do have Lounge Lizard. I couldn’t quickly find a good preset at first glance
Bad luck, because according to the Lounge Lizard developers you can’t start with a raw Wurly or Rhodes sound and shape it the way you want either, they all have effects… 
Turn them off
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I’m sure I can dial in a great sound, but with all the other sounds I’m working to convert, I was hoping for a better starting point. After revisiting it again, the Wurly was much better out of the box, but a lot of the Rhodes presets were a little dark sounding by default. I’ll need to spend some time with the settings to see what helps brighten them up a bit
Helps to read the manual 
Dialing up the velocity parameter a bit helps give it some more bite.
They are a bit effects heavy, but those can definitely be turned off. I can see the potential vs Pianoteq’s models though
When you turn off the effects, in a plugin where everything is based on effects, you don’t have much left. There are some nice sounds in Lounge Lizzard, but if you don’t like them, it gets complicated.
I don’t think that’s the case with this plugin. It’s a physical modeled plugin and has a bunch of parameters you can use to change the base sound that aren’t effects. It does a good job modeling the different settings and characteristics of the Rhodes. The effects are ok, but I usually run things into TH-U for better phasers/chorus/tremolo if it’s a song that features the Rhodes mostly by itself. For background parts, the built in effects usually suffice
I don’t understand this claim ---- I can turn off all the effects in Lounge Lizard and then play with the characteristics of the hammers, tines, forks, etc
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Without effects LW still sounds like an e-piano, but not like a Wurly or Rhodes without effects, or it is at least very far and the sound is super thin. While with effects, some of the sounds are nice.
Did you try to tweak it?
I haven’t tried LL, so I cannot compare.
But I installed the Rhodes V8 pro beta plugin and played around with a lot of the possible settings. There are an enormous number of parameters that can be adjusted, but as I didn’t manage to create just one sound that I really liked (I’m getting old), and because it is only a trial, I decided to call it a day, and asked RhodesMusic for uninstall instructions by email. A robot replied instantly and promised that a customer care agent would respond as soon as possible. After 3 working days without having received a human reply I decided to uninstall manually. And I must confess that I did find it quite difficult. The Gorilla-engine and the Codemeter apps wasn’t especially hard to uninstall, but I found numerous other items at multiple locations that I had to manually remove. This plugin consists of a huge amount of files, and the authorization system is quite complex.
Now you know.
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Yes, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for when playing a Wurly or a Rhodes. I naively assumed, that by removing the effects, I would find the original E-Piano sound, but it was not the case for my taste. I have never found the “body” that I expect in this kind of instrument, the one that the real instruments have. However, a few presets were very fine for me, but not a majority for my taste. Because in the end, as with all plugins, it’s just a matter of personal taste.
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Some notes from my re-visit of Lounge Lizard after finding the presets lacking in useful character.
Definitely check out the manual to get a better understanding their specific terminology as some term they use aren’t immediately clear even if you are familiar with the inner workings of the Rhodes.
The Force parameter can be very helpful in getting more “bite” from the hammers and a bit more brightness when playing vs some of the presets. The Vel parameter will help fine tune how the velocity responds to the Force settings
Tone Bar can further help add more aggressiveness to the sound or mellow it out, depending on your needs.
The rest of the parameters will fine tune some of the various noises to taste to help add some realism, but it seems a little goes a long way before they get in the way of the main sound.
I didn’t hear much difference or improvement of the sound using the Character parameter and prefer to run the dry signal into TH-U Overloud for Amp and FX (Roland JC120, Small Stone Phaser, CE-2 Chorus, etc)
It seems that I’ll have to do some fine tuning on the Force/Vel settings once I play it on my gigging board as the keyboards velocity curve can drastically change the playability of the plugin as well as the overall sound.
I have a much better opinion of it than before and it gets a very good sound without having to deal with samples as the Rhodes V8 does. I don’t see myself using a sample based Rhodes plugin any time soon, even for home/studio use
I love the BFly Model V out of the box patch. I turn off effects and supply my own via other plugins. There are some Rhodes sounds that I find Velvet is better for.
Nice, didn’t know there was an “official” Rhodes plugin available for testing before yesterday when I noticed this post. Decided to give it a try.
As a reference, I opened my three favorite rhodes plugins (VTines, Keyscape, Pianoteq). I tend to prefer VTines in a live setting because of its lightness and tweakability. Keyscape sounds better out of the box and has plenty of other tasty instruments but it’s of course a lot heavier on resources, has truckloads of samples and costs more than any other keyboard plugin I’ve ever had (and just as a sidenote: I definitely didn’t get it just for rhodes). Pianoteq rhodes I want to like more, but it hasn’t improved in the same pace as the grand piano sounds. Maybe it’ll get there some day.
But this V8… I’ve tried and played so many sample libraries and modelling plugins that I was not expecting to be impressed. But the first preset sound was very, very nice!
Keyscape tries to impress you with a compressed and big sound when you first open it. Rhodes V8 also had some compression going on with the default preset, coupled with a smiley EQ setting (= high- and low-boost). But even at absolutely dry and flat settings, it was a joy to play. Nice amount of mechanical key noise added for flavoring, so you’ll feel more like sitting at the real thing. Only thing I immediately wanted to dial back was pedal noise (really, who on earth likes that sound and wants it to be amplified like that?).
The stock effects on the front panel are very basic effects you’d expect from a rhodes plugin (Vari-Pan, Chorus, Phaser, Delay), but the quality is really high and they have chosen just the right controls to make them fit nicely. I found it slightly odd that they have “hidden” the amplifier+cab settings to the “Detail”-setup page, since I find the suitcase amp and Fender Twin options to be pretty essential for the sound (not saying there is anything wrong with the DI-sound of a good rhodes, I just prefer them amped). Also, a big plus from me for the Preamp Drive, nicely responsive overdrive for a person who likes their rhodes a bit dirty.
The only thing I would totally remove from the front is… the picture of the keyboard. Does someone actually play these plugins with their mouse or something? Lounge Lizard, VTines and many, many other plugins have realized years ago that showing a 3D modelled picture of the instrument on the front is just enormous waste of screen estate. I’d be happy to change it to something useful, like the amp settings…
I’ve never seen tweakability like this on a fully sample-based rhodes plugin (VTines is sample based, but only partly). Just like on VTines, you can “open the lid” of the instrument. Level, damper settings, fine tuning, and timbre (which I’d compare to “hammer hardness”-setting), can be set for each key individually. No pickup distance setting like on VTines, but you can achieve a lot with the available options already. The V8 can do anything from softer MKII-type sound all the way to classic Dyno-modded LA-sound.
But above all, it does all this while sounding very realistic. I do like LoungeLizard in principle (I’ve never owned it, but tried it many times throughout the years), since it’s so lightweight and very tweakable (you can do everything listed above and more) and definitely doesn’t sound bad, but having played and recorded several well maintained rhodes pianos, LL simply feels a bit… plastic to me. Similar feeling I used to have with Pianoteq grand piano sounds in its earlier days (I first tried it at version 3), it was good but not quite as natural sounding as I’d have liked.
But would I buy the Rhodes V8? Propably not, in my situation where I have an almost equally great sounding, tweakable, very quickly loading and lightweight option (VTines). On my 8-year-old laptop, the V8 doesn’t load too quickly and adds a bit too much latency for my liking. It doesn’t have ridiculous amount of samples (at least compared to Keyscape) but compared to the 80 MB of VTines it’s pretty big still. Considering it’s still in the beta phase things might change in the near future, but in my books it still goes to the category “just another sample based rhodes plugin”, although a pretty impressive one.
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6 weeks ago I asked RhodesMusic for uninstall instructions regarding their Rhodes V8 beta trial plugin, and I still haven’t received a reply from their customer care department.
But today I found their official uninstallation guide:
Now you know 
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