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A clavinet is a musical instrument, manufactured by the Hohner company. Its distinctive sound has appeared particularly in funk and rock songs of the last fifty years.
The clavinet is essentially an electronically amplified clavichord. It consists of 60 keys and 60 associated strings, giving it a five-octave range from F0 to E5.
Each key uses a little rubber tip to do a "hammer on" to a guitar-type string when it is pressed, just as the clavichord did in the old days. The end of each string farthest from the pickups passes through a weave of yarn. When the key is released, the yarn makes the string immediately stop vibrating.
The Clavinet has two pickups, which are positioned like, and function as, the two pickups on a guitar that guitarists call the treble and the rhythm pickup. The clavinet has pickup selector switches, and a guitar-level output which can be patched to a guitar amp.
Other Hohner keyboard products, the Cembalet and Pianet, work by different principles, and are not like the Clavinet at all.
The archetypal clavinet sound can be heard on Stevie Wonder's track Superstition.
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