clavinova

Yamaha CLP-370 with Sticking, Clunking, and Dead Keys

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Today I’m sharing a few pictures of a repair on a Yamaha CLP-370 with sticking keys, clunking sounds, and dead keys. But this could happen on most Yamaha Clavinovas. See my Digital Keyboard FAQs for more!

Hammer Rest Felt (Sticking and Clunking)

One of the most common complaints I receive from customers is that their keys are making a noisy thunk when the release them.

This is typically caused by worn key felts, and in particular, a worn hammer rest felt. In fact, this problem is nearly ubiquitous in Clavinovas, and many Yamaha portables, that are over a decade old. And of course, this wear can be dramatically worsened by spills or foreign substances finding their way into the keyboard!

Just a friendly reminder not to set your soda on your valuable Clavinova!

This particular CLP-370 had a soda spilled in it, which also meant that several keys were sticking quite badly. In the CLP-370, this is part V7640101, and is readily available through Syntaur. See below the difference between the original hammer rest felt, and the replacement:

Oh boy! That's one worn hammer rest felt. The worn felt is below, with the replacement above it.
Oh boy! That’s one worn hammer rest felt. The worn felt is, obviously, below, with the replacement above it.

And the Dead Keys

Yamaha Clavinovas and, in fact, most digital keyboard instruments, use contacts underneath the keys to sense how quickly you press them. If those contacts misbehave, they can either imagine you’re playing at maximum intensity, all the time, or they can miss that you’re playing at all! In this case, the Clavinova wasn’t registered key presses at all.

On disassembly, I observed that soda had found its way onto the contact circuit boards. See the image below:

A closeup of a soda spill on the vias. Exposed Yamaha contacts can be seen mere millimeters away.
A closeup of a soda spill on the vias. Exposed Yamaha contacts can be seen mere millimeters away.

Here’s a closeup of some similar damage on a Yamaha P-125:

A closeup of a Yamaha contact from another angle. Here, you can see pocking in the trace underneath the surface of the circuit board. A little bit of a rust on a solder joint stands out like a flag to help locate the damage.
A closeup of a Yamaha contact from another angle. Here, you can see pocking in the trace underneath the surface of the circuit board. A little bit of a rust on a solder joint stands out like a flag to help locate the damage.

Depending on where the damage is located, it can be cleaned and bypassed. It’s often less time-consuming (and more permanent) to replace the contact board.

A closeup of a corroded connection on the center circuit board of the P-125 referenced above.
A closeup of a corroded connection on the center circuit board of the P-125 referenced above.

Giebler’s Yamaha DOM Package for a Clavinova Backups

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Yamaha service note from 2004 refers to Giebler’s Yamaha DOM package, which is used for copying Clavinova and Disklavier files. I’m in the process of transferring files in a Yamaha CLP-156, a Clavinova from 1994, which uses an early version of ESEQ. I was curious to see if Giebler’s software package gave me better results than the more modern tools I have available, and if it might have an edge reading older disks.

You can view the Yamaha DOM Package from Gary Giebler on the Giebler website. It’s a bit pricey — $54.95 at the time of this writing. But it’s a specialized tool!

However, it requires an MS-DOS based version of Windows. I couldn’t get it to run in FreeDOS, as it required a Windows environment for the installation. However, I was able to get it running on Windows ME, running on physical hardware with an internal floppy disk drive. This is a very high bar to clear for installation — Windows ME and Windows 98SE are hard to install on modern hardware, to say the least, and Windows ME barely ran on the 2008 era computer I used for this process. So I looked for a better solution.

Running Giebler’s Yamaha DOM Package on a VM

Eventually, I was able to improve on this. I’m now running it on a virtual machine using VirtualBox. To start with, I had to install Windows ME, and found a Windows ME VDI ready to use on Internet Archive. The Giebler software will install only in the Windows environment, but on the virtual machine it won’t run in it. It was necessary to install DOS Mode for Windows Millennium Edition, and then reboot into DOS. Obviously it can’t directly read the floppy disk drive from within VirtualBox, so I make images of the floppy disks, and then attach those to the session after booting into DOS.

If you’re interested in making floppy disk images for use with Giebler’s Yamaha DOM package in a virtual machine, you’ll find a Greaseweazle is just the tool to make high-quality images of your disks.

Reading a Yamaha Disklavier Floppy Disk

Finally, I got everything installed, and I got to the first screen. This software has the following options, and none are particularly helpful for our purposes:

The Yamaha Disk Manager control screen. (Serial number and name are scrubbed from the status bar.)

I tried a handful of disks with it. I found its performance at reading disks somewhat limited compared to modern tools like Mark Fontana’s Player Piano Floppy Backup Utility (PPFBU). But it was able to look at disks and list their contents, and it had a pleasant old-timey feel. See, for instance, a directory listing:

The directory listing for a Christmas album I used as a sample.

I attempted to make a copy of the disk, and was met with an error. “Illegal to Copy!” As you can see in the above screenshot, Giebler’s Yamaha DOM package notices that the disk is “Copy Protected!” And it alters its behavior accordingly.

Reading my Clavinova Disk

So now, for my Clavinova. First, using Yamaha Disk Manager (YDM), I copy the track to the local disk:

Copying an MDA / ESEQ file to the local disk.

And then, I open up the DOMSMF application. At this point, I can select “Convert Yamaha to Midi” and, remarkably, it works!

Instructing DOMSMF to convert the MDA file to MIDI.
Playing the song in Windows ME (before transferring it to an actual computer from the modern era)!

Note that tempo and track data are successfully transferred. This information is lost by DKVUTILS when converting MDA files to MIDI.