One of the biggest influences on everything we call music today. RIP Florian.
http://www.aktivitaet-fanzine.com/10_kk0.html
The above link is a great resource for any Kraftwerk fans. Aktivitaet was a Kraftwerk fanzine published in the 90's.
There's some mystery about who designed their robo-speech box [1], because Schneider (and colleagues) actually patented it.
[1] Not the vocoder, but the chip-speech system used on The Mix.
If we're willing to give Steve Jobs credit for the iPhone I think we should be equally willing to give Schneider & company credit for their ideas that were instrumental - (heh) - in moving the synth field forward. The fact that many of their sounds were novel when first recorded is the strongest proof of their original contributions, if it has merely been off the shelf hardware created by others then this would not have been the case, you'd have heard those sounds from other artists before then.
Relatively few people celebrate forerunners like Morton Subotnik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Iannis Xenakis as innovators, and that is because those guys sucked. Kraftwerk rocked, and we can hear the difference.
IMO, IMO.
Everybody in electronic music was influenced by Stockhausen. But Stockhausen never got a whole lot of air play. If you listen to his stuff I think it's obvious why.
It was the same process Tangerine Dream went through with Projekt Elektronik, PPG, Steinberg, and other collaborators. The band had an idea or some product feedback, and the designers implemented it.
KW's sequencers were unique in that they had rotary switches instead of pots for the sequence steps, which made them much easier to program.
A tape loop is nothing more than a primitive form of sequencer. By definition they loop a sequence. They do the exact same thing. So not having to physically change the tapes and speeds on a tape machine by programming it into a sequencer is most definitely "automating" that process. The issue with analog tape machines is that they were not fun to deal with on the road or work with live.
And no they were not "two step" sequencers. What would be the point in that? You could do that with that a single finger - on/off. The Synthorama was a 16 step analogue sequencer and they had two of them which game them a 32 bit sequence to work with[1]
A sequencer is definitely not used for anything similar to "automating tape loops". For Kraftwerk they were used mainly in the studio to created drum sequences and melodies that were much more precise than those played by the band. The whole point of the sequencer was to replace Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, and maybe some bass lines or melodies played by Ralf with a robotic sound.
Programming a sequence in an analog sequencer like a Synthanorma is way harder than changing a tape. Have you ever programmed one? Back then you didn't have presets or pitch quantization, so for melodies for example you'd have to tune each step by ear. Drum loops were easier but not as easy as changing a tape.
Using them on the road was much harder than using tapes. In fact, even several years later, bands like Depeche Mode were still taking tapes to the road because sequencers were still clunky and difficult to program live. It was only after the advent of preset programming this started to change.
Before Autobahn, Kraftwerk indeed experimented with tape loops, but for very different kinds of sounds, more of the Stockhausen variety.
The things that led to this experiment with synthesizers and sequencers were the primitive rhythm machines of the time (they were already going in this direction with songs like Tanzmusik, but they wanted with custom drum sounds and custom drum rhythms, not the Samba and Cha-Cha-Cha of the Maestro) and their use of echo in "Ralf und Florian", where the echo was used to get a perfect repetition of something played (not a loop though, since it's not something that is "left alone" like a sequencer or a tape).
And by "two step sequencers" the parent poster clearly means "two units".
Also, it's called Synthanorma, not Synthorama.
Large pepperonis can be ordered from any pizzeria, this is hardly the same kind of engagement.
Probably pretty high given that the Roland MC-8, another 16 step analog sequencer was also available in 1977 when Trans Europe Express was released. Both Yellow Magic Orchestra and Tangerine Dream used them. Both bands would have been very much on Kraftwerk's radar at that time. Tangerine Dream aside from being another influential German electronics band was also a customer of Matten & Wiecher.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1795693416/patch-and-tw...
Another interesting source is the Deadmau5 masterclass. What is striking is that Joel Zimmer has neither vocabulary, nor technical understanding of how modulars actually work - yet he is eminently able to use a modular synthesizer and (kind of) explain how they work. Using a large modular synthesizer is essentially assembling a synthesizer out of parts - and this requires understanding the connection between the parts and the sonic results.
- Understanding how to combine various elements making up a synthesizer in a musically relevant way is necessary but not sufficient to design synthesizers.
I think an experienced modular synth sound designer is closer to the needed skillset than someone who is able to design circuitry. Not least because an experienced sound designer will know how the thing is used and what artists want from it.
The mid to late 80s is kind of a good illustration of what happens when engineers geek out (and product managers are tempted to skimp on user interfaces) and artists are not properly part of the process. Compare the many FM synths (and synths using FM combined with various technologies) to subtractive analog synths from 5-6 years earlier.
Then look at the prevalence of presets recordings (Jean Michel Jarre's "Revolutions" is essentially a parade of Roland D-50 presets). This is very telling of how the design and technology changed how artists used synthesizers.
Designing a synthesizer requires a combination of the two, but to me it seems that the latter is a more rare skillset than the former. There are a lot of synthesizers on the market, but relatively few that are seen as particularly good. If you dive into the universe that is Eurorack modules you will quickly realize just how much stuff there is. And not nearly all of it is very good.
(There is, of course, some fetishising over famous originals that fetch a pretty penny today. For instance a 45+ year old ARP 2600 will easily set you back $10,000 - and the re-issue costs about $4,000).
A good example is the Moog ladder filter. A mistake was made in the design so the circuit didn't work as intended. However, Robert Moog decided that the mistake was really a happy accident that made the filter more musically relevant and unique. This requires understanding both the electronics and what is musically important.
It is also important to remember that there was no abundance of synthesizers at the time, so there were few expectations as to how a synth should sound or how the artist would use it.
In your Deadmau5 example ... I think we might be saying roughly the same thing. Once you buy all those modules, who needs an EE? The circuit problems should hopefully be hidden at that point.
...as long as you don't connect anything to mains power or irreplacable modular synths :-)
This feels a little extreme. Artists can obviously collaborate with engineers on musical instrument design. The contribution is real even if the artist is clueless about like how the oscillators are temperature compensated.
[1] http://www.maindragmusic.com/ca-1970-maestro-rhythm-king-mrk...
"The pads had no dynamics at all" doesn't mean they didn't manufacture the pads.
You seem to have an axe to grind here. IMO this is not only bad form in the HN itself, but also very distasteful in a thread about someone who just passed away. I won't answer you anymore.
Kraftwerk in many ways was the ultimate nerd band. I believe that Florian Schneider would be tickled to know his fans were painfully dissecting the minutiae and lore of his equipment.
I was also careful to point out in my original comment that I was "not trying to detract from their genius in any way."
It was simple, but it required creativity and some electronics skill (or at least a lot of trial and error and soldering).