I've been having fun playing with electric harpsichords in Pianoteq. The point is that a harpsichord is quite similar to a guitar, so if I can get some good electric harpsichord sounds I should be able to plug them into the various plugins that support guitar effects. Pianoteq is generally quite good at pianos, and does have an electric piano in the free-with-a-license KIViR package, but no electric harpsichords, although it does have some acoustic harpsichord models in KIViR so I'm mostly working with them and I'm recording here what I do to make them work better with distortion.
I'll note that I have a Pianoteq Std license, and I paid the market rate for it, so this isn't in any way promotional material. If you have a license yourself, then you can follow along. If you don't, then this won't be as useful to you, but I think you can still follow along with a demo, with some instruments that I only have demo access to as well.
The first step to electrifying you harpsichord is to set "fuzz" and "amp" effects. The standard way is to put fuzz before amp, and both before reverb. If you're routing to external effects, turn off reverb on Pianoteq to get a standard distortion sound. The built-in Pianoteq effects aren't very good or very flexible, but they're enough to get started with. It's easier to have everything in one application when you're fiddling around with the settings.
I move the microphones close to the instrument, and close to the strings. This emulates the sound of pickups that get the sound directly from the strings. It also means the mechanism noise gets louder, which is annoying, but don't worry because we're going to turn that down in a minute. It may be that this doesn't matter, and you should leave the microphones alone. So do that if you like, but if you do move the microphones closer, do it now before you adjust the mechanism noises.
I also like to lower the lid so that the microphones sit under it. This is a matter of taste, and probably the opposite to what you'd do to emulate a solid body guitar, but it makes a clear difference to the sound. Do as you like.
While you have the microphone settings open, try increasing the "Sound speed". This is like moving everything closer together, and it makes a lot of difference to the sound. With pickups, you'd essentially be getting the sound directly from the strings, so the faster the speed of sound, the more like pickups it is.
If you want to get this effect with an acoustic instrument, you'll have to fill the studio with a lighter gas. Maybe a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, if you still want to breathe while you're playing the harpsichord. This might cause problems with Health and Safety, which shows the advantages of pickups, or digitization.
A higher speed of sound does remove the sense of space in the instrument. You might not want this. It means disabling some of the good work Pianoteq is doing to emulate an acoustic instrument. And this is a hint: as a high speed of sound makes the instrument sound less naturally acoustic, maybe you should be playing with a lower speed of sound in you acoustic instruments!
You can close the microphone settings now. The plucking noise is in the "voicing" section pretty much in the middle of the application window. This is emulating the sound of the quill (or what the drop-down calls a hammer) and is the equivalent of pick noise in a guitar. It's reasonable that it wouldn't be as loud with pickups and it gets a lot more obtrusive when you use distortion, so turn it down to taste. The right setting is probably not completely off, which leaves a bland, synthetic sound, but you might end up there anyway.
Pianoteq also makes a noise when you lift the key back up. This is something that I'm sure harpsichord makers try to minimize, but something that you miss if it goes away completely. As Pianoteq is in the business of exactly replicating the sound of acoustic instruments, it also emulates this mechanism noise. It sounds annoying with distortion and you can turn it down, so try that. It's one of the "action" settings you get by clicking "ACTION" in the bottom-right section where you also find effects.
While you have the action settings open, you can turn down other noises.
The soundboard impedance governs the sustain. The higher the impedance, the less energy is lost to the air, which is a problem for an acoustic instrument but fine here. A high impedance will have more sustain and sound more like a solid body guitar. This setting is in the top-right under "Design".
While you're here, you can play with the "cutoff" and "Q factor" sliders, with affect how bright the sound is and how fast the brightness tails of as the note sustains.
The "string length" slider the inharmonicity. Turning it to the right, to get 10 meter strings, will make the strings perfectly harmonic. Harmonic sounds are crisper when they're distorted. I don't think there's much inharmonicity in a harpsichord, but no matter, this won't do any harm.
You might also want to reduce the unison width to the left in the tuning section. This is like chorus which is, generally speaking, better done after distortion.
If the sound carries on after you release a key, and in the likely event you think this is annoying with distortion, you can turn it down with the "sympathetic resonance" or "duplex scale" sliders in the design section. This is something that isn't entirely bad, so I think down not off is the best position. It's similar to what you get by letting the guitar strings ring except that there's no equivalent to putting you hand on the strings to dampen them.
The documentation says that the duplex scale was patented by Steinway in 1872. I don't know how it comes to be on a 17th century harpsichord model, but it certainly is on some of them.
A harpsichord sound with distortion can sound harsh, so apply some EQ. You get this for free with "equalization" in that bottom-right menu. I find the "Soft" preset is good to start with.
This gets applied before the effects. If you want to modify the distorted sound, and you have a spare slot, you can also set an "EQ3" effect.
A real harpsichord is very poor in dynamics, electric or not. But there's no need to be constrained by the limitations of physical instruments, so give yourself some dynamics. Also try setting different "plucking brightness" for piano and forte in the voicing section.
Here's what I've been playing with