As the only one in its industry Dieter Doepfer even may use their name for advertising purposes.
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| Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk) and Dieter |
The caller was Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk. Schneider experimented much with speech synthesis, and had found a keyboard that was triggering speech sounds (phonemes) in place of letters.
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| Doepfer's miniature MMK2 keyboard for Kraftwerk |
In the end, the Kraftwerk operator could connect the phonemes with a sequencer into sentences.
Until it worked, Schneider had come several times to Munich, where they got to know eachother better.
Around that time, Dieter installed a MIDI-retrofit on their old EMS vocoder.
Also in the construction of the MAQ 16/3 analog sequencer with MIDI output, the company worked with the musicians.
Florian Schneider was apparently quite involved with the development of the 16/3, being regularly sent updates to the operating system and giving his comments in return.
In 1996 Florian Schneider also wrote a review for a German music magazine 'Keys' about one of the Doepfer company's newest items, the A-100 vocoder module and even contributed a short demonstration of the units capabilities on the free CD that accompanied the magazine.
During 2001-2002 Morgan Karlsson asked Dieter Doepfer about his collaboration with KRAFTWERK:
" Our collaboration with Kraftwerk started many years ago as we made some special designs for them (e.g. the miniature keyboards they use on stage for Taschenrechner/Pocket Calculator and a special phonetic keyboard for voice synthesis).
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| "Designed in cooperation with the German Band KRAFTWERK" |
So we went many times to the KlingKlang studio in Dusseldorf until the final version of the MAQ was complete.
A similar cooperation - but not as close as with MAQ - was made for the SCHALTWERK.
(Kraftwerk also used/tested with a Doepfer MOGLI on stage around that time *PP)
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| Rumors are that the Doepfer logo was (partly) inspired by this 1983 Kraftwerk album font |
The next cooperation was the A-100 vocoder.
We tested all of the vocoders of Florian (and that's a lot) and compared them to our A-100 vocoder prototypes (the first versions with different filter designs in quantity and filter response types, e.g. 10 band passes, 8 band passes and high/low pass, 13 band passes and the final version with 13 band passes and high/low pass).
And so we found a very good compromise between price and sound.
Even the very high priced vocoders sounded not significant better than the final A-129.
important for a good vocoder effect (is now included in the A-129-5).
All high priced vocoders imply such a treble boost but the customers is not aware of this detail as there is sometimes no remark in the user manuals.
We experimented together with Florian with a 32 band graphic equalizer to find the best treble boost for good speech recognition and implemented it into the A-129-5."
