Native Instruments Scarbee Clavinet & Piano User Manual page 8

RESTORATION
From the start we had decided to sample the black and metal colored "road" model of the
original instrument because it was better shielded and more recent. And I managed to get
a great looking instrument, it looked almost new. I spent the Christmas holidays to change
strings and hammers, which seriously stressed my back. Then I started the initial recordings,
but it just didn't sound as good as the recording clips I had from my friend Christian Vinten's
recently restored version, the classic wooden one. I went to see my friend Preben Lyngmark,
who had two of the wooden ones in his repair shop and we compared both models directly,
with the result that they did sound different. We discovered a slightly different preamp and
modified the road one's amp to our liking. But still the sound was not right—probably due to
the metal case of my version. Although Preben did a great job (as usual), we never got the
road version to sound as good as the wooden one, so one day I called Christian and begged
him to lend me his instrument for a few months...(it took a year before I returned it). Preben
now replaced a single transistor in the preamp to reduce noise a little bit. Another problem
was that sometimes the switches wouldn't work. Fortunately we could fixed that. The original
is driven by a 9 Volt battery (!) and we had to change it quite often to avoid bad sound...
Changing the rubber hammers was easy, but the green yarn (wow), each string had to be put
through very gently and in exactly the right way, was a headache. If any of this got broken, it
would have been a complete disaster, the yarn is the damper of the strings! The strings came
in four sizes: three different bass gauges and one treble string. It was no fun at all to replace
those. Tuning the instrument was also quite cumbersome; some of the strings were very hard
to turn and you had the feeling they would break any second. I had to retune pretty often
while sampling, but in the end the instrument sounded as if it came directly from the factory.
Scarbee Clavinet and Pianet – User Manual – 8