Clavinet Extractor

How to isolate the clavinet in a song

1. Upload the song. MP3, WAV, M4A or FLAC, up to 10 minutes. Sign in with Google the first time.
2. Press Extract the clavinet. The price is on the button before it runs: 1 credit per minute of the song. New accounts start with 5 credits.
3. Listen and download. Two reels appear, Clavinet and Without the clavinet. Click either to hear it by itself, then download it as an MP3 at 320 kbps.

If processing fails, the credits come back.

What the clavinet sounds like

A clavinet is an electric keyboard built around strings. Pressing a key pushes a string against a hard point, a pickup picks up the vibration, and the result is a sharp, twangy, percussive sound with almost no sustain. Run through a wah pedal, it becomes the choppy, funky pattern you know from 1970s funk, soul and disco. Rock, reggae and later funk-pop and hip-hop records borrow the same sound, and a lot of modern producers use it as a sample or a plugin.

In a song it plays short, tight rhythmic figures, often sixteenth notes, locked in with the bass and drums. It acts more like a rhythm guitar than a piano.

Who wants it alone

• Keyboard players learning how a funk part is built: the muted notes, the ghost notes, the way hands stay in the same place.
• Producers who want a clean clavinet loop to sample.
• Bass and drum players who want to hear the groove without it, to play their own.
• Video makers looking for a funky bed that is not too busy.

Take the Clavinet file to Audio to MIDI, pick Piano / keys, and you get a MIDI version of the pattern. Ghost notes may need cleaning up.

What it gets confused with

The classic confusion is funk guitar. A wah-chopped rhythm guitar and a clavinet share rhythm and brightness, so one can leak into the other's file. If the track has both, check Without the clavinet for guitar and check Clavinet for guitar. For the guitar side, see the Electric Guitar Extractor. Other near neighbors are the Rhodes and the organ, which both play chords but sound softer. To take out all keys in one go, use the Keyboard Extractor.