The story
Klaviphon is electric piano from 1960s Czechoslovakia. It was manufactured at organ making factory in Krnov which needed something to do after demand for church organs was suddenly lower in now-communist state. It works by plucking steel reeds in similar way how Hohner Cembalet and Weltmeister Claviset works but its piano action is different as far as I know (I did not seen Cembalet open yet). There is pickup coil at each reed and that’s basically it.
It’s rather primitive instrument. It has no active electronics, only knee lever to adjust volume. I added chorus and reverb to make it more usable on it’s own but feel free to use any effect you like, but note that some effects bring up the noise.
As I did not have proper cable for it I sampled it in very sketchy way by literally hooking it to jack connector with two pieces of wire hence the name “Sketchy Klaviphon”. It worked surprisingly well and enabled me both test if pickup is working and sample all the keys.
Some keys are little bit out of tune, others sounds little bit wonky. I kept those defects as it adds some character to this sample pack. There are no round robins as those wonky keys sounds wonky repeatedly even in real life. There is no velocity sensitivity, you need to use knee lever (on real instrument) or modulation wheel (on sample pack).
You can hear some examples in this playlist – https://soundcloud.com/severak_cz/sets/klaviphon – both real instrument and sampled version.
Made by Severák in April and May 2024
Contributors
Severák
Recorded all the notes and all the processing (using Bjoern Bojahr's session2wav program).
Interface
Reviews for Sketchy Klaviphon
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Nice but...
I like the character of the instrument's sound a lot. There's a bit of electrical noise in the background but I don't mind that too much. There's also the odd note that sticks out from a level perspective and the tone of notes is not always consistent but again, it doesn't spoil the enjoyment or usability. There are one or two notes (in the higher registers) where there's a bit of lag in triggering which are a bit more bothersome. I hope some sample trimming can be done to fix this.
