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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90623, member: 27"] Hohner built around 38,000 Clavinets between 1964 and 1982, and every one of them makes its sound by slamming a small rubber pad into a steel string. That is the entire secret. The snarl that powers a thousand funk records is pure mechanics, amplified. The design belongs to Ernst Zacharias, a German engineer who joined Hohner in 1954 and traced his whole career back to a love of Bach. He wanted a clavichord that an audience could actually hear, since the original instrument was notoriously thin-sounding. While refining his 1961 Claviphon prototype, he discovered that striking a hammer tip across a string mounted on a fixed anvil let players attack the keys far harder, and the extra force brought real volume and bite. Production started in 1964, and the D6 arrived in 1971 as the version everyone now means when they say clavinet. Strictly speaking, it is [B]an amplified electric clavichord[/B], yet it behaves nothing like its ancestor. A clavichord whispers politely. A D6 bites. [HEADING=2]A rubber hammer frets each string against a metal anvil[/HEADING] Open one up, and you find 60 steel strings running diagonally across a metal harp beneath the keybed, one for each of the 60 keys from F1 to E6. Every key pivots on a fulcrum at the rear, with a spring to return it and a metal holder underneath gripping a small rubber tip. Press the key, and that tip drives the string down onto its anvil, fretting it the way a guitarist hammers on a note. Because the striker sits directly under the key, the keyboard is fully dynamic. Play harder and the note gets louder and brighter. Ease off, and it softens into a woody thump. Let go, and the note dies almost instantly. The far end of each string passes through a weave of damping yarn that chokes the vibration the moment the rubber tip releases. There are no dampers to regulate and no sustain pedal at all, just wool doing the job. [HEADING=2]Guitar-style pickups and rocker switches shape the tone[/HEADING] Two electromagnetic pickups sit above and below the strings, built and positioned much like the neck and bridge pickups on an electric guitar. Two rocker switches, labeled A/B and C/D, choose which pickups you hear and combine them with inverted polarity for thinner or fatter voicings. Small movements here produce very different records. Four more rockers, marked Brilliant, Treble, Medium, and Soft, filter the signal on its way out of the built-in preamp. This bank of six switches is the mature form of the tone control Hohner first tried on the Clavinet II, and it rewards experimentation more than any manual admits. A mechanical mute slider adds the last trick, damping the strings so every note lands as a short, dry pluck. From the preamp, a line-level output feeds whatever amplifier you choose, and this stage is where the funk moved in. Players learned quickly that the D6 loves a wah or auto-wah pedal, a pairing that became the signature keyboard setup of 1970s funk. Zacharias himself kept a personal Clavinet fitted with stereo speakers and a built-in phase shifter, and he considered that effect part of the instrument's true sound. [HEADING=2]The parts that make the bark are the parts that wear out[/HEADING] The rubber tips deteriorate with age, and a dead tip means a key that no longer plays properly. The strings actually outlast guitar strings, since the sealed case keeps finger oil and sweat off the metal. Even so, all 60 strings still need tuning individually, and owners treat that as routine upkeep rather than a repair. Hohner ended production in 1982, dropped support over the following decade, and eventually destroyed the tooling. For years afterward, a crumbled tip simply meant a silent note. Then, in 1999, an enthusiast named Aaron Kipness began manufacturing replacement hammer tips, and a small repair trade has kept the survivors playable ever since. Hohner tried to move past the D6 with the Clavinet Duo in 1978 and the better-shielded E7 in 1979, but neither replaced it in anyone's affection. The D6 remained the funk machine. Its successors became footnotes. Scarcity does the rest of the work. Roughly 38,000 Clavinets were ever made, against about 250,000 Rhodes pianos, and clean examples grow rarer every year. So when Rhodes wanted this sound in software, it multi-sampled [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/rhodes-recreated-a-rare-clavinet-d6-in-clav-pro.76017/']a rare 1977 Clavinet D6[/URL][/B], because the character worth capturing lives in one specific instrument's wood, rubber, and yarn rather than in a schematic. [/QUOTE]

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