Hohner Clavinet

Just put a jack in the hole and enjoy the funky music.
Is pretty difficult to find any kind of instruction book but you know, is just an electic clav. 5 minutes and you can handle all the switch variation.

The various switch allow to change the nuanse of the sound. But the only thing to do is to press the pick up down and play funky.

The keyboard touch is really sexy. On the low strings you can feel the vibration. The keyboard has kind of back response so your finger jump on the keyboard.
Just press a key and 30 years of music, the history of funky, the most exiting things you hear in your life will get out from your amp.

I own a MINT d6. I will never gig with it. When I will have another d6 probably I will value. The problem is that no way how much they talk, it's impossible to emulate it.
I had an Electro 2 and only if you put all the onboard effect (since you cancel the original clavinet sound) you could have something.

No way. Also if I didnt need nothing until now, I am sure that Aaron of clavinet.com could help a lot.

Is the best thing I ever owned, but depends: if you like '80 or '90 music and you want to have atmosphere or disco dance, a patch is more then enough. But if you want to BECOME funky, to improve your technique and make the difference, buy it.

Clavinet D6 - The funkiest instrument ever made

Very good keyboard. No MIDI

Very expresive. A special clav-sound. Can sound like a electric guitar or funk bass

The electronic have to be refreshed now and then

I dont think Hohner supports Clavinet anymore. But there are places on the Internet that eems to be helpful, for instance www.clavinet.com

I should be hard to live without this instrument if I had to

Please visit my Clavinetpage on www.soundofmusic.se

This is the text of an email I sent to a friend who wanted to know about a Hohner Clavinet I used to own back in college.
There appears to be no real info on the clavinet on the net. I used to own one long ago so here's what I remember.
The clavinet was produced by Hohner. Basically it is a stringed keyboard instrument. It is about 4 feet (110 cm) long by about 5 inches (12 cm) high and about 15 inches (36 cm) deep. The entire box is basically square with no curves except for rounded edges. It has (I think) about 61 keys (5 octaves) on the keyboard. The top of the unit just behind the keys lifts up and open with hinges on the back top.
Under the hood you can see portions of the strings on a metal string board running in a diagonal from front left to back right. There is I believe 1 string for each key. In this configuration, given the size of the box, the lowest notes get the longest strings and the highest notes get the shortest. Also the guage of the strings changes as you move up the scale of the keyboard. On the stringboard but under the strings you can see what appear to be huge guitar pickups. These pickups in my model were active. By active I mean that they were powered by I believe nine or twelve volts, dc. I think I remember two, but there might have been three. I think that different models of the clavinet had different numbers and types of pickups.
Each key of the keyboard is made of very lightweight but strong plastic which gives playing it a flimsy sort of feel. This is actually good because the clavinet is touch sensitive in that the harder you play each key, the louder and more colored the sound is for that note. Each key is hinged at its back with springs so the keys bounce back up after each stroke. Under each key is a metal stick about an inch and a half (3 cm) long with a square little cup like holder on the end facing straight down. Inserted in each holder is a rectangular hard rubber nub. This nub is what makes contact with the string directly below the key and hammers the string onto the string board so that the string resonates and makes a sound which is picked up by the pickup(s). The harder you hit the key, the harder the string is hammered onto the stringboard and the louder the string rings out. Also, because everything is physical, the hardness and speed at which the string is hit not only affects its volume but also its tonal character. This makes the clavinet even more expressive. To apply the electric guitar analogy further, the clavinet appears to be like a huge fretless metal guitar neck in a box with huge active pickups. Instead of being plucked, the strings are hammered (i.e., like "hammer-ons" style of playing a guitar).
The controls of the clavinet are simple. At its most basic is a volume knob. There might also have been an overall tone knob. Then there are from one to several fat plastic rocker switches which had two and possibly three positions each. These switched would control the settings of the pickups. On, off, high level, low level. etc. Just like in a guitar, the different combinations of pickup activity changes the tone of the overall sound. Finally, on only some model, there also was a slider switch which when slid brought down a long felt bar on top of the strings to mute them. If the slider was most extreme, the sound would be totally muted. A proper placing of the muting bar would create a quieter effect.
The back of the unit had only a single output, maybe a headphone jack and a jack for the dc power.
The sound of the clavinet is like a harpsichord but more percussive and clean in that there is no sound of the actual pluck made by a harpsichord. It is a totally recognizeable sound. Used by Stevie Wonder in "Superstition" and by practically every big group of the seventies. Pink Floyd on "Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Part Two" from the Wish You Were Here album, Bob Marley on "Could You Be Loved," Led Zeppelin, ELP, and countless funk groups. In the higher registers, the notes