Yamaha's Flagship CLP series Clavinova, the CLP-695GP
Are you looking for the elegant beauty of a grand piano in a compact space and don’t want to compromise on the sound, touch, and responsiveness of a grand piano keyboard action? If so, then the Yamaha CLP-695GP Clavinova is the perfect instrument for you. At under four feet deep, the CLP-695GP is a premium digital piano that never needs to be tuned, and boasts a 300W hi-fi sound system with speaker cones that use the same spruce wood found on the soundboard of Yamaha’s CFX Concert Grand Piano! Samples of the Yamaha CFX 9’ concert grand and Bösendorfer Imperial 9’6” grand pianos sound incredible through these speakers. Yamaha’s GrandTouch technology offers a graded action with the longest wooden keys found on digital pianos, providing exceptional keyboard leverage and responsiveness for the full range of expressive touch and rapid repetition. This paired with synthetic ebony and ivory keytops allow for a touch and feel that is unbelievably close to playing on an acoustic Grand Piano. The sound of an acoustic grand piano resonates throughout the entire body of the instrument. This produces a rich and resonant sound that envelops the listener. Yamaha skillfully recreates these sensations through Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM). VRM is a sound recreation process that goes far beyond just sampling the sounds of hammers hitting strings. Yamaha samples blends of string resonance, damper resonance and smooth release. In addition, real time sound modeling calculates the various states of the strings for each note from one instant to the next. When you play this piano, you feel the sensation of the entire instrument vibrating and providing the acoustic reactions to all other parts of the piano, from strings to frame, rim and aliquot, etc. No other digital piano provides this level of immersive acoustic sensation in such a beautiful design.
If you’ve always dreamed of playing your favorite song on the piano, you probably do what most folks do these days and go to YouTube. YouTube is an incredible resource for free piano lessons. In fact, I provide a pretty extensive series on how to play Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy on YouTube myself. YouTube is really great for providing free information. However, it’s not so good at giving you direct feedback. How do you know if you’re playing the notes the right way, the right time? It’s really up to you, right? And if you don’t know how to play the piano in the beginning, you can really waste a lot of time trying to figure out if you’re doing it right or wrong. Well, what if there was a way of combining the best of YouTube in terms of the video instruction and an instrument that could actually give you feedback and let you know if you’re doing it the right way?
I want to introduce you to an amazing app called flowkey. flowkey connected to an instrument like the Yamaha Clavinova can provide exactly what I’m describing, real video lessons that can dynamically tell you if you’re doing it right or wrong with feedback connected to a Yamaha digital piano like the Clavinova CLP-695 that I’m sitting in front of right now. So in this video I’m going to give a quick overview of the flowkey app and how to connect it to your Yamaha Clavinova, both wirelessly and with a wired cable, as well as how to set it up on an iPad and an Android smartphone. So let’s get started with flowkey.