A harpsichord plucks its strings. A clavichord strikes them and holds on. Almost every other difference between the two — how loud they are, what shape they are, what they cost, which one could sit in your house — follows from that one sentence.
The harpsichord is the loud one, the instrument Bach wrote concertos for, and it plays at very nearly the same volume however hard you hit it. The clavichord is quieter than the conversation you would have over the top of it, and it is the only keyboard instrument built before the piano that answers to the weight of a finger.
Harpsichord if you want to play with other people. Clavichord if you want to play at home.
The repertoire, the teachers and every continuo part in Baroque music assume a harpsichord, so that is the instrument to learn if you intend to play with anyone. The clavichord costs roughly half as much, sits on a table, is inaudible through a wall, and teaches finger control that the harpsichord physically cannot. Neither is sold in ordinary music shops and neither is cheap, so the first thing worth buying is not an instrument at all — Kottick’s Harpsichord Owner’s Guide is what tells you whether the one you are looking at is a bargain or a restoration bill.
Table of Contents
- Clavichord vs. harpsichord, side by side
- One plucks and lets go; the other strikes and stays
- The clavichord hears your fingers. The harpsichord does not.
- How a harpsichord gets loud and soft instead
- Fretted and unfretted clavichords
- Fifty decibels is quieter than it sounds
- Shape, size and telling them apart on sight
- What they cost, and where you would actually get one
- You will be tuning it yourself
- So which one is more popular?
- FAQs
- What is the main difference between a clavichord and a harpsichord?
- Which is louder, a clavichord or a harpsichord?
- Can you play loudly and softly on a harpsichord?
- Which is easier to play?
- What is a fretted clavichord?
- What is Bebung?
- How much does a clavichord or harpsichord cost?
- Which came first?
Clavichord vs. harpsichord, side by side
| Clavichord | Harpsichord | |
|---|---|---|
| How it sounds a note | A brass blade — the tangent — rises and presses against the string, and stays there | A plectrum on a rising wooden jack plucks the string and lets go |
| Does touch change the volume? | Yes, across the instrument’s whole range | Barely — measurements put it at about a decibel per step |
| Vibrato | Yes, by rocking the finger on a held key | Impossible |
| How loud | About 50 dB at two metres — below normal speech | Enough to lead an ensemble or fill a small hall |
| Strings per note | One pair, and on older instruments shared with the neighbouring key | Two or three, at different pitches, switched in and out by hand |
| Range | 3½ to 5 octaves | 4 octaves on an Italian single, 5 on a French double |
| Shape | A plain rectangular box, usually on a table or a light stand | Wing-shaped, like a small grand piano, on its own legs |
| Weight | Around 40 lb — one person can carry it | 150 lb and up, and awkward with it |
| How you change the tone | With your fingers, and nothing else | Registration: stops, a coupler, and often a second keyboard |
| What it was for | Practising, teaching, composing, playing to yourself | Solo repertoire, continuo, concertos, opera |
| Tuning | Yourself, most times you sit down | Yourself, most times you sit down |
| Realistic cost | From about $2,300 as a kit; around $8,000 from a maker | From about $4,400 used; $12,000–$20,000 for a good single |
| Where you buy one | Specialist early-keyboard dealers, individual makers, or a kit. Not general music shops. | |
One plucks and lets go; the other strikes and stays
Press a harpsichord key and you raise a jack — a thin slip of wood standing on the back of the key. Set into the jack is a pivoting tongue carrying the plectrum, a sliver of quill, leather or plastic. On the way up the plectrum catches the string and plucks it. On the way back down the tongue swings out of the way against a small spring, so the string is not plucked a second time, and a scrap of cloth in the top of the jack settles back onto the string and silences it.
The important part of that sequence is the moment the plectrum lets go. From then until you release the key, nothing you do with your finger reaches the string. The note is already out of your hands.
The clavichord does the opposite. Each key carries a small brass blade called a tangent, which rises and presses against its string from below — and does not come away. The tangent both sets the string ringing and marks the end of the vibrating length, so it is acting as hammer and nut at the same time. The dead length on the far side is permanently muffled by a strip of cloth woven through the strings, which is also what stops the note: lift the key, the tangent drops away, and the whole string is smothered by that cloth.
So for as long as a clavichord key is down, your finger is still in contact with a vibrating string through a rigid lever. That is the whole difference between the instruments, and everything below is a consequence of it.
The clavichord hears your fingers. The harpsichord does not.
Play a clavichord key harder and the note is louder, in the ordinary way a piano is. Play it softer and it is quieter. There is no register to change and no stop to pull; the dynamic is in the finger. It is why C.P.E. Bach favoured the clavichord above the other keyboards of his day and treated it as the instrument on which a player’s touch could properly be judged.
It goes further than volume. Because the tangent is still pressing on the string, rocking the finger on a held key varies the string tension and bends the pitch. That is Bebung, a vibrato produced after the note has begun, and no other keyboard instrument of the period can do it.
The same mechanism is the hardest thing about playing one. Extra pressure sharpens the note whether you meant it to or not, so a heavy hand does not simply sound loud, it sounds out of tune. Clavichord technique is largely about controlling that.
On a harpsichord, the amplitude the string ends up with is very nearly independent of how fast the key went down. Careful measurements do find something — a stronger attack shifts the balance of harmonics and can move the level by around a decibel a step, up to about five decibels in the bass. It is audible if you are listening for it. It is not dynamics. Against a piano’s range of thirty decibels or more, a harpsichordist has no volume control worth the name.
How a harpsichord gets loud and soft instead
It changes how many strings sound, and which ones.
A harpsichord carries more than one set of strings, named by organ convention after the length of pipe that would give the same pitch. An 8′ set sounds at written pitch; a 4′ set sounds an octave higher; a 16′, on the few instruments that have one, an octave lower. Each set has its own row of jacks, and a hand-operated stop slides that row a couple of millimetres sideways so its plectra either reach the strings or miss them entirely. A common Flemish disposition is 8′ + 4′; a French double usually has two 8′ sets, a 4′, and two keyboards.
The second keyboard is not for playing higher notes. It gives access to a different set of strings, so the two hands can play at two different volumes and colours at once — and a coupler, often a shove mechanism that slides the upper keyboard back seven millimetres, makes the lower manual play both at the same time for the loudest sound the instrument has.
Two more devices get confused with each other constantly, including by people selling instruments. The buff stop slides a batten of leather or felt pads against the ends of one set of strings, damping the upper harmonics and leaving a short, dry, plucked sound. The lute stop is a separate row of jacks that plucks an existing set of strings very close to the nut, which is a nasal, reedy, altogether brighter effect. One mutes; the other does not. The buff stop is the one you will actually meet, and it is the one usually mislabelled.
None of that can be done in the middle of a phrase — stops are moved by hand, between sections. So the expression that happens inside a phrase is built from time rather than volume: how long each note is held, how much silence is left before an important one, small elasticities of tempo. A harpsichordist emphasises a note by placing it late and leaving air around it. It works, and it is a genuinely different craft from piano playing rather than a poorer version of it.
Fretted and unfretted clavichords
Because a clavichord tangent decides where the string starts speaking, two tangents striking the same string in different places produce two different notes. Makers used that: on a fretted clavichord, adjacent keys share a pair of strings, which makes the instrument smaller, cheaper and lighter. Clavichords were built this way for the first three centuries of their existence; the first mention of an unfretted one, with its own pair of strings per key, comes in 1693.
The cost is that two notes sharing a string cannot sound together. Makers paired the notes least likely to be wanted at once — a natural and the sharp beside it — but the restriction is real, and some passages simply cannot be played on a fretted instrument. Anything with a G against an A♭ is out.
For a first clavichord this matters less than it sounds. Fretted instruments are the cheaper ones, they hold their tuning better because there is less tension on the case, and the repertoire written when fretting was universal fits them by definition. If you intend to play late Bach and beyond, buy unfretted.
Fifty decibels is quieter than it sounds
A clavichord measures around 50 dB(A) two metres away. Ordinary conversation runs 60 to 65. So the instrument is not merely quiet, it is below the noise floor of most rooms — a fridge, a computer fan or traffic through a closed window will bury it, and a listener has to be within a few feet and the room has to be silent.
That single number explains the clavichord’s whole history. It has no ensemble repertoire because it cannot be heard next to anything else. It was the instrument of the practice room, the teaching room and the composing desk, and it stayed popular in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia and Iberia into the early 1800s, long after the harpsichord was being pushed aside by the piano everywhere else.
The same fact is the strongest modern argument for owning one. A clavichord is an acoustic keyboard you can play at midnight in a flat with a neighbour on the other side of the wall, and nobody will know. Nothing else does that.
Shape, size and telling them apart on sight
A harpsichord is wing-shaped and horizontal — the outline of a small grand piano, with the strings running away from the player, a hinged lid, and its own legs or stand. A clavichord is a plain rectangular box with the strings running left to right across it, and it usually sits on a table or a light trestle. If it looks like furniture rather than a piano, it is a clavichord.
Vertical harpsichords do exist — a clavicytherium stands the soundboard up on end, like an upright piano — but they are rare, and mostly museum pieces. Nothing you are likely to be looking at will be one.
The weight difference follows the shape. A clavichord runs to about 40 pounds, small enough to carry to a lesson. A harpsichord starts around 150 and needs two people and a plan. Both were often decorated well past the point of necessity — painted soundboards, marbled cases, Latin mottoes on the lid — because these were the good furniture of a wealthy house as much as they were instruments.
What they cost, and where you would actually get one
Neither instrument is a retail product. There is no model range, no shop with one on the floor, and nothing on a general marketplace but decorative props and toys. Real ones come from three places: a small number of makers building to order, the specialist second-hand market, or a kit you finish yourself.
Clavichords are the affordable end. A fretted kit starts around $2,300 and a more ambitious one around $3,400; a reconditioned instrument through an early-music dealer runs roughly $4,000 to $5,500, and a new one from a working maker starts around $8,000. Harpsichords are a different order of money — used singles turn up from about $4,400 through dealers like the Harpsichord Clearing House, a good Flemish or French single sits somewhere between $12,000 and $20,000, and doubles and restored antiques run to $25,000, $35,000 and beyond.
Second-hand is where most people buy, and it is also where the money is lost, because a harpsichord that has sat unplayed for a decade can need thousands of dollars of work that is invisible in a photograph — a cracked soundboard, a warped case, a whole set of perished plectra, pins that will not hold. This is the point at which reading beats browsing.
Two books do more for a prospective owner than any amount of browsing. Edward Kottick’s The Harpsichord Owner’s Guide was written by a man who has built some thirty instruments, and it covers the things that decide whether a second-hand harpsichord is a bargain or a money pit — what the national styles are and what each is good for, what to examine before you pay, and then how to voice a plectrum, replace a string and set a temperament once it is yours. Joan Benson’s Clavichord for Beginners is the equivalent on the other side and much harder to come by: a practical account of how to touch the instrument, from someone who spent a career playing it. Reckon on around $50 in print, or well under $20 as an ebook.
You will be tuning it yourself
Both instruments are strung at low tension in thin wooden cases that move with the weather, and both go out of tune far faster than a piano. Harpsichord players tune before nearly every session; it takes ten or fifteen minutes once it is a habit. Calling someone out to do it is not practical, so this is a skill that comes with the instrument rather than an optional extra.
Two things make it harder than tuning a guitar. Baroque music is usually played at A=415 Hz, roughly a semitone below the modern A=440, and many instruments have a keyboard that slides sideways to switch between the two. And the temperament is rarely equal — meantone and the various well temperaments are what this repertoire was written for, and they are the reason a harpsichord in a distant key sounds the way it does.
A guitar clip-on is the wrong tool for it. Those assume equal temperament at A=440 and cannot be told otherwise, which rules out both of the things this repertoire needs. What works is a tuner that calibrates a long way below 440 and stores the historical temperaments as presets — the Korg OT-120 has been the early-music standby for years. It calibrates from 349 to 499 Hz in single-hertz steps, so 415 is a setting rather than a workaround, and it holds eight historical temperaments — Werckmeister III, Kirnberger III, Vallotti, Young, Kellner, Pythagorean and two meantones — alongside equal. Around $80.
So which one is more popular?
The harpsichord, by a wide margin, and it has been ever since Wanda Landowska began performing on one in the early 1900s and unveiled a new two-manual Pleyel at the Breslau Bach Festival in 1912. The historically informed performance movement that followed rebuilt the instrument along period lines and put it back into orchestras, opera pits and conservatoires, where it remains.
The clavichord’s revival has been quieter, in every sense. It is played by a small and committed group, mostly at home, and its literature overlaps almost entirely with the harpsichord’s — the two instruments shared players and shared music for centuries, and very little was written for the clavichord alone. It never disappeared, and it has never been in fashion either.
Also read:
- Piano vs. Harpsichord (What Are The Differences?)
- Harp vs. Harpsichord (What’s The Difference?)
- Is the Piano a String Instrument?
- Keyboard instruments, explained
FAQs
What is the main difference between a clavichord and a harpsichord?
A harpsichord plucks its strings with a plectrum and a clavichord strikes them with a brass tangent that stays pressed against the string. Because the clavichord’s tangent keeps contact, the player controls volume and can add vibrato; on a harpsichord the note is beyond the player’s reach the instant it sounds.
Which is louder, a clavichord or a harpsichord?
The harpsichord, by a long way. A clavichord produces around 50 dB(A) at two metres, below the level of normal speech, and cannot be heard alongside another instrument. A harpsichord can lead an ensemble and carry in a small hall.
Can you play loudly and softly on a harpsichord?
Not with your fingers. Playing harder changes the tone slightly and the level by about a decibel, which is nothing next to a piano’s range. Harpsichordists change volume by switching sets of strings in and out with hand stops, coupling two keyboards together, and shaping phrases through note length and timing instead.
Which is easier to play?
The harpsichord, if you already play piano — the keys behave predictably and the touch is light and shallow. The clavichord is unforgiving in a way no other keyboard is: too much pressure sharpens the note, so a heavy hand plays out of tune rather than merely loud, and a fretted instrument will refuse certain intervals outright.
What is a fretted clavichord?
One where adjacent keys share a pair of strings, their tangents striking at different points to give different notes. It makes the instrument smaller and cheaper, and it means the two notes sharing a string cannot be sounded together. An unfretted clavichord gives every key its own strings and plays anything.
What is Bebung?
A vibrato unique to the clavichord, made by rocking the finger on a key that is already down. The tangent is still pressing the string, so varying the pressure varies the tension and wavers the pitch. It cannot be done on a harpsichord, an organ or a piano.
How much does a clavichord or harpsichord cost?
A clavichord kit starts around $2,300, a reconditioned instrument runs $4,000 to $5,500, and a new one from a maker starts near $8,000. Harpsichords begin around $4,400 second-hand, with a good single manual between $12,000 and $20,000 and doubles well beyond. Neither is stocked by general music shops — they come from specialist makers, early-keyboard dealers, or as kits.
Which came first?
The clavichord, with the first known reference in 1404, though the two developed alongside each other through the fifteenth century and both flourished until about 1800. The piano displaced both, and the harpsichord returned to the concert stage in the twentieth century while the clavichord stayed a private instrument.