Not long after the product line came to an end, the Rhodes brand name was sold to Roland by Fender in 1987 for $20,000. Around 1990 new "Rhodes" synthesizers began to appear, the most notable being the MK-80, a weighted-action 88-key digital piano. This synth featured several Rhodes patches, along with acoustic piano, vibraphone & clavichord simulations, and effects including chorus and phase shifting. The concept was a great one, but the sound was not: Harold commented in an interview with Keyboard Magazine that it made him "sick". The engine behind the MK-80 was Roland's S/A synthesis model, used in the RD-series pianos at the time. Harold and Major Key's John R. McLaren had constructed a single-key model of the Rhodes, an adjustable-pitch mechanism that could reproduce any note across the entire range of the piano, which Roland sampled and analyzed in developing the S/A patches. Again, this seemed like a great idea at the time, but these early attempts at physical modeling were far from accurate.
Also offered was the MK-80's little brother, the MK-60. This was a stripped-down version of the synth with only 64 keys and 8 patches, none of which could be edited. As a result it was cheaper and more portable, but the sound was just as inferior. And then there was the VK-1000, an early predecessor of Roland's VK-series tonewheel organ emulators. Features included 76 weighted keys, drawbars for realtime control of the organ tones, and additional patches that included other piano/synth tones and Rhodes sounds from the MK-80. This keyboard would be reborn years later as the Roland VR-760, after a huge leap in technology and sound quality. Finally, there were the Rhodes 660 & 760 models, 61- and 76-key versions of Roland's U-20 synth marketed under the Rhodes name. There were no Rhodes-specific sounds here: it was simply an attempt to sell more keyboards.
