Home-Made Clavinet

Hi, I'm Peter and I always wanted to build a clavinet myself. I originally thought I'd make one in the style of a harpsichord, with the strings all going straight back. After thinking a long time about it, I finally just bought one on eBay. When I saw how it was made inside, I knew I was ready to make one--if I could just get the harp. Luckily, I had found out about Clavinet.com and contacted them to see if they had a harp. Sure enough, they did. So I starting with a harp and modified an organ keyboard by putting in the hammer tips. After that, I made a coil winder, then I wound the pickup coils. After that I made the preamp. Finally, a friend with a wood shop helped me with making most of the case. Here are some photos to show you how it all went. Click MOV to watch a 90-second QuickTime movie sound clip of my friend, Steve, demonstrating the way this Clavinet sounds. The sound was recorded directly into GarageBand and later syncronized with the movie. You will need Apple QuickTime player installed to play this movie clip. The file size is 1.6MB and it might take several minutes to download to your computer memory before QuickTime starts. (Thanks to http://www.jakeludington.com/ for the coding tip to embed QuickTime movies.) Click WMV to play a 30-second, and different Windows media movie if you don't have QuickTime. This one's sound is straight from the little digital camera's microphone.

Some of the Construction

These are some views of the hammers. They are just regular nails that I epoxied into the keyboard. They then have square brass tube sections that hold the hammer tips. I used some nail polish to fasten the brass tubes so I could easily change the angle or height if I needed to (so far I haven't needed to).

Here are some views of the home-made winding machine in process winding one section of the pickups. Each section got about 130 turns of #40 guage wire. The sections I finished winding are in the last photo wired together. The six sections are in series to make a whole pickup, but I switched the wiring of every other section out of phase with its adjacent sections. That way, I ended up with a humbucker made of six sections. I made two of these pickups for the two positions inside the Clavinet. The switch puts the pickups separately, or together in-phase or out-of-phase for four positions (like a two-pickup guitar would be). That is the way the original Clavinet works. I left off the switches for the other subtle tone changes, because they can be duplicated by the tone controls on the amplifier. Also, I didn't put in the string damper, because I thought it wasn't something I wanted to use. The pickup switch and combination volume control/on-off switch were all that I thought I needed. One of the members of the clavinet forum suggested I add the damper, because he explained how it can give a great effect when used together with an envelope follower. (Great tip. Thanks!)

Here are some views of the bridge area showing the pickups and how I wired the sections out of phase. The last photo is the preamp, which I built based closely on the original clavinet schematic (courtesy, Clavinet.com). Click here to read the details and see some graphics concerning how I built the pickups and the preamp.

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