FadaRebbs

Biography

Richie Maynard aka Fada Rebbs Born 1962 in London as long as he could remember music was always part of his life "I remember Dad playing records by Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Brook Benton and Dinah Washington" He recalls " I remember my aunt had bought 'Solid Gold Soul' a various artists soul album from Atlantic records I remember telling Dad how much I loved it on my 5th birthday a few weeks later I was awoken by Dad standing by my bedside with a Dansette record player and said album. I was the happiest kid on the planet!"
Growing up Rebbs learned to play the violin at school, the bugle in the Church Lads Brigade and played drums for the school jazz band but his real love was the piano. They couldn't afford one in those days but when a friend of his father's was throwing one out he acquired it. " Well I was 10 and I watched when they rolled this old jalopy of a piano into the living room it was taller than me at the time battered and out of tune I tried to bash out that familiar ditty in 'C' that everybody knows but hey weren't happening and the blind man with the labrador rocked up a few days later and tuned it..."

That was the beginning of the Fada Rebbs we know today. He promptly learned to play and graduated to pianoforte grade 8 in a couple of years. He taught himself how to play jazz riffs and chords from books that he'd borrowed at the local library. Passionate about electronics and sound (the passion that he still has today) Rebbs got into Reggae Sound Systems and built his own sound Marshall Sound System and hearing sirens at dances built his first synthesiser for the sound's special effects and found himself playing lead lines over records when they played out and Rebbs started to cut his own dubplates playing these riffs over popular tunes. The natural progression was to put a band together to cut dubplates for the sound which lead Rebbs to the recording studio...

It was during this time that Rebbs became a session keyboards player for several Reggae and Soul bands both live and in the studio and learned the art of sound engineering from watching Eddie from East London's Easy Street, Mark Lusardi and most notably Dennis Bovell. "I got hooked on the engineering thing when I was in Studio 80 playing piano and organ on an Errol Dunkley album and Dennis had this massive room with and 18" speaker at one end and a mic at the other and when I watched him 'play' the reverb return fader I knew that I had to have my own studio "

Producing quality music since 1987 he has gone on to produce artists like Junior Delgado, O J Diamond, Michael Rose (Black Uhuru), VC and Panchita Latouche. The VC and Panchita Latouche productions reaching number 1 in several UK charts in recent years and currently producing and mixing projects with Chris Brown aka Natural Mystique (former lead singer for Black Uhuru after Junior Reid) and Stevon Lorenzo. He's also created new reggae genre called Neo Reggae a blend of Jazz and RnB keeping the natural reggae elements.