I am honoured to say it: the Clav Pro by Rhodes is out, and I've barely stopped playing it since.
Rhodes have supported this channel for years, so thank you to them — but the reason I'm enthusiastic here has nothing to do with that. It's modelled on the Clavinet D6, and I happen to have a real black D6 sitting in the studio a few feet away. That's how I can tell you this thing is ridiculous.
Let me take you through it panel by panel, and then I'll stop talking and play. Because that is what a Clav is for.
The mechanics
The first panel has the global tune, and then something I wasn't expecting: control over the sound of the mechanics.
A real Clavinet is a percussive, mechanical instrument. The key noise is part of it. Here you can dial in as much or as little of that noise as you like — all the way down to none at all. Keep reading, because that control turns out to do something much more interesting than it first appears.
Timbre and pickup position
Next along is timbre, which effectively moves you between pickup positions. Move it up, move it down, and you're holding a different instrument each time.
Further along there's the EQ / pickup section, and this is the one I find most interesting. It gives you the classic pickup combinations, and if you know your Clavinet records you'll recognise them instantly. What's clever is that these aren't just EQ curves layered on one sound — they're different sets of targeted samples. You can hear the whole character change, not just the tone.
Then brilliant, and the treble / medium / soft switches. Soft on its own is lovely. Medium is where a lot of records live. Treble is where it starts to bite.
Amp, mic and preamp
You also get the amplifier, and a choice of microphone — cardioid, an L5, and the Roland Jazz sound, which is exactly the one you're hoping is in there.
Turn all of that off for a moment and listen to the preamp on its own: volume, and a distortion that is genuinely gorgeous. Not fizzy, not a plugin doing an impression of dirt — it behaves like a preamp being pushed.
Compression, wah and the rest
The compression section does what it should, which is glue the percussiveness together so the quiet notes come up.
The wah is really powerful, and the resonance control on it goes further than most. Combine that with a bit of delay and you're in the territory everyone bought a Clavinet for in the first place.
There's chorus, and a phaser that I think is even prettier than the chorus. Reverb gives you plate and room — I prefer the room, personally, with a bit more of it than is strictly sensible.
And there's a velocity curve, like the other Rhodes plugins. You can set it so that playing quietly still sounds hard, or so that playing hard stays gentle, and then set the depth of the effect on top. That's where you fine-tune the instrument to your own hands.
The trick hiding in the mechanics control
Here's the thing I promised to come back to.
Turn the mechanical noise all the way down and the instrument stops behaving like a real Clavinet — because you lose the release. On a real one you hear the key coming back up. Without it, you get the sound of a sampled Clav, the way it was on records where the part was played from a sampler rather than the instrument.
That's the sound of a particular famous record, and once you've got it, all you need is a touch of delay and you're there. I saved it as a preset and called it Doctor Sirius.
And then there's the real one
The reason I can tell you it sounds like the real thing is that I could turn around and check. I've made an entire documentary about the Clavinet, which is worth your time if this instrument interests you at all.
By the end of this video I was playing the Rhodes and the Clav at the same time. Who's the lucky boy.
Go and look at the Rhodes Clav Pro. It's out now, and it is the most convincing Clavinet I've played in software.
From the Doctor Mix shop
