The Allure of the CLP-700 Series

The CLP Series of digital pianos utilizes cutting-edge technology to recreate the experience of performing on a grand piano, allowing the pianist to play the keys with many variations of speed and depth to achieve an unlimited variation in tone and create uniquely personal performances. With expressive capabilities approaching those of a grand piano, the CLP-700 Series is sure to make playing the piano so much more enjoyable than ever before.

The GrandTouch keyboard, finely-tuned 3-way speakers and transducers bring you the touch and feel of a real grand piano.

• New Yamaha CFX and Bösendorfer Imperial piano samples, new Yamaha CFX and Bösendorfer binaural sampling
• 38 voices, including 2 fortepiano voices (Mozart Piano/Chopin Piano)
• Improved VRM (Virtual Resonance Modeling)
• Grand Expression Modeling
• GrandTouch™ keyboard, 88-key Linear Graded Hammers
• GP Response Damper Pedal
• (42 W + 50 W + 50 W) x 2 amplifiers
• Grand Acoustic Imaging
• (16 cm + 8 cm + 5 cm + transducer) x 2 speaker system
• USB Audio Recorder (Playback/Recording: WAV)
• 20 rhythms
• Built-in Bluetooth® audio
• Wireless connection to the Smart Pianist app via Bluetooth® MIDI
• Touch sensor control panel

Convenience Only Digital Pianos Can Deliver

Clavinova pianos are loaded with convenient features only digital pianos can deliver. You can use headphones to keep your surroundings quiet, or connect a Bluetooth® device to your Clavinova for playback through its speakers. Also, connect to Yamaha’s app, Smart Pianist, to gain extra help for your piano practice. The touch-sensitive control panel only displays text when it is on—when the panel is off, it has the smooth finish of a keyblock just like an acoustic piano.

Enjoy a dialogue with a great piano

The player plays, the piano responds, and the player continues to play. The player conveys the feelings they want to express, and the piano responds, in an ongoing exchange that forges a dialogue between the two. In order for this to be a truly rich exchange, both the player and the piano must possess excellent expressive capabilities; the piano must be easy to play and highly responsive, and it must produce beautiful sounds. CLP-700 Series pianos satisfy all of these conditions, and the inspiration borne from a dialog with it is sure to arouse your desire for expression.

Features

Playability

GrandTouch™ keyboard

Yamaha’s latest keyboard action features a broad dynamic range and faithful response to every nuance of touch that puts a wide expanse of tone—from delicate to bold—at the pianist’s fingertips. The highly consistent grand piano hammers replicate the pleasing response felt when the hammers strike the strings, enabling precise control of the tone. Highly absorbent synthetic-ivory white keys and synthetic-ebony black keys prevent slipping even during extended play and feel just like those of a grand piano.

Leverage your artistic expression

When playing a digital piano, the back area of the keys may prove to be a challenge to full musical expression. This is because the back of the key is closest to the fulcrum of the action. The closer to this pivot point that you strike the key, the less leverage you have and the more strength you need to apply. The greater length of GrandTouch keys give the player MORE leverage, allowing for better expressive control, even at the backs of the keys. This is the same support length found on the Yamaha S3X premium grand piano (as of July 2020), and is the longest support length used on any digital piano.

GrandTouch keyboard features wooden keys that showcase Yamaha’s expertise with wood for pianos. Just as with grand piano keyboards, the solid wood is cut from the very best parts of well-dried lumber, making the keys more resistant to warping than keyboards made of laminated wood. The wooden texture and structure of the keys create a more grand piano-like feel.

88-key Linear Graded Hammers—the first digital piano keyboard ever to feature realistic weighting on every key

Every single key on a grand piano keyboard is weighted differently. This is because the strings for each note are slightly thinner and shorter in the treble register, becoming thicker and longer towards the bass register. The 88-key Linear Graded Hammers of the Clavinova is the first-of-its-kind to faithfully duplicate this graded touch with differing weights and key return on each one of its keys. This results in a feel and response that is astonishingly like that of a grand piano, and allows players to gain an appreciation of a more authentic touch.

Escapement mechanism of Clavinova keyboards

The escapement mechanism in a grand piano moves the hammers away from the strings quickly after they strike them, in order to prevent any interference with string vibration. This mechanism produces a slight clicking sensation when the keys are pressed gently.

The Clavinova keyboards feature an escapement mechanism that reproduces this sensation near the bottom of the key dip. They have been designed in such a way that the click is discernible only on the lightest keystrokes, similar to the keyboard of a grand piano. These keyboards have been adjusted to provide additional friction that balances key repetition and response without impeding performance.

The GP Response Damper Pedal

Using the damper pedal subtly alters the nature of a piano’s sound and is essential to providing the pianist with all the necessary expressive tools to convey their musical vision.

Clavinova digital pianos feature a damper pedal that continually detects depression depth and allows halfpedaling, which lets players make minute adjustments to pedal depression and return, changing the depth and character of their piano sound.

The GP Response Damper Pedal offers a grand piano-style resistance curve, starting out light to the touch and growing heavier as the pedal is depressed further. This allows players to become accustomed to the nuances of delicate pedaling.

Design philosophy

Clavinova pianos boast excellent playability and versatile functions, along with a refined, authentic design that blends a compact form with modern aesthetics in a manner befitting the instrument that sets the contemporary standard for pianos. At the heart of the Clavinova design concept is the way the player feels when they take their seat in front of a Clavinova piano. Unnecessary elements are removed from the player’s field of vision to create a convincingly natural space that feels just like sitting at an acoustic piano. This represents Yamaha’s consideration to players who practice on Clavinova and perform on grand pianos—they are able to take the stage free of tension or worry because everything feels normal, as it should. A Clavinova piano is a part of the player’s everyday life—contemporary accents and color variation are available to mesh with any interior design or lifestyle.

Touch sensor control panel

The touch panel only displays text when it is on—when the panel is off, it has the smooth finish of a keyblock.

Sensitivity

Grand Expression Modeling

The interaction and interplay of the hammers, dampers, and strings inside a grand piano respond to the subtlest nuances of the pianist’s touch, creating a limitless range of tonal expression. Touch refers to the pianist’s control, not only of intensity (softness/loudness) in playing and releasing the keys, but also of the speed and depth with which the keys are pressed. The Grand Expression Modeling introduced in the CLP-700 Series translates the widely varied input from the pianist’s fingers into the same limitless tonal variation of a grand piano.

This makes it possible to vary the output by playing the keys to different depths and with different speeds, even when using techniques such as trills or legato or emphasizing the melody over the accompaniment. Grand Expression Modeling excels at faithfully reproducing the output expected of these techniques in many well-known songs. In Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” a loose touch creates the faint tone that makes the melody stand out more crisply. In Liszt’s “Un Sospiro,” the accompanying arpeggios accent the melody without overwhelming it, and varied expression of the melody gives it the same quality as vocals. In the last of the Chopin nocturnes, trills, legato, and other delicate techniques where fingers seem to float over the keys deliver the airy, smooth tonal expression required. Playing such pieces on a highly expressive piano helps the pianist learn various techniques and experience the same joy of expression as a painter, but through sound.

Sound Quality

Newly sampled Yamaha CFX and Bösendorfer Imperial voices

Clavinova grand piano sounds are recorded from several world-renowned concert grand pianos. One of them is the CFX, Yamaha’s top-flight concert grand piano. Pianists around the world are enamored with the impressive, dazzling, richly expressive sound of the CFX in concert halls. Another sampled concert grand is the Imperial, the flagship model of Bösendorfer, a time-honored Viennese piano brand with an ardent following. The Imperial is known for its abundance of color and natural, warm feeling. Yamaha faithfully reproduces the idiosyncrasies of these concert grand pianos by carefully recording the entire tonal range of each of the 88 keys, making minute adjustments to capture the most harmonious tones each piano has to offer.

Virtual Resonance Modeling

One of the allures of the grand piano is the sympathetic resonance created by the vibration of the entire instrument. Clavinova pianos elaborately reproduce this rich sympathetic resonance through a groundbreaking technology called Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM). VRM creates a richly varied sound by simulating the complex sympathetic tones created when the vibrations of the strings are propagated to the soundboard and other strings, corresponding to the timing and intensity of key playing and pedaling. CLP-700 Series pianos even replicate the sounds the dampers make when they are raised off the strings, in addition to the resonance of the duplex scaling, strings, soundboard, and case. Clavinova pianos allow you to enjoy the same momentary dynamics and deep sympathetic sounds that are produced by the entire body of a grand piano.

A fully immersive concert grand experience—even with headphones

Binaural sampling is a method of sampling in which special microphones are placed on a mannequin’s head in the same positions as the pianist’s ears to capture piano sounds the way that they sound in reality.

We chose this method to create the ambience and full, natural resonance of acoustic pianos in Clavinova pianos. This makes pianists feel as though they are sitting at a grand piano even when they play with headphones on. The experience is so pleasant that they forget they are wearing headphones, no matter how long they continue to play.

On CLP-700 Series pianos, binaural sampling was used for the Bösendorfer Imperial as well as the Yamaha CFX. Yamaha achieves higher-definition binaural sound with a specially developed mannequin head and model ears used for the recording.

We also developed the Stereophonic Optimizer function to achieve the same effect for the piano effects. Stereophonic Optimizer technology replicates the natural diffusion of sound in headphones nearly as closely as binaural sampling for the piano voices other than the CFX and Imperial.