A digital piano made by the good people at Yamaha. It's a full 88-key piano with some major improvements over a standard non-digital piano. It can produce all kinds of realistic musical instruments ranging from trumpet to guitar to violin to organ. Yes, it can also do piano sounds. My model of Clavinona has three different kinds of pianos, in fact. It can also produce non-traditional sounds such as space sound (an echoing high pitched tone) and even a human ahhh sound (such as from a choir).

The Clavinova has a disk drive so the pianist can record different tracks and play them back at any time. Track types include "right hand" (melody), "left hand" (accompianment), and various rhythm and orchestra tracks.

Speaking of orchestra tracks, the Clavinova can produce its own backround music in the styles of swing, big band, disco, waltz, pop, country, rap, showtunes, and many other types. Many popular/standard modes are built in to the piano, but you can buy disks full of additional styles that can be installed from the disk drive. However, the pianist does not have to use the orchestra modes at all - one can shut off all the bells and whistles and play an ordinary piano if that's what one truly desires.

The Clavinova has headphone jacks and is MIDI capable. In this era of MP3, however, it's just as easy to connect the piano's headphone jack to the Line In of a computer and record an MP3 of live playing instead of a tingy MIDI file. It also sports a built in digital metronome, a pitch bender, and lots of neat blinky lights. Clavinovas don't come cheap, however. Be prepared to pay in excess of $1000 for a reliable model.

Get going, musician, and I'll see you in concert!