The Doepfer - Kraftwerk Connection

German Krautrock legends Kraftwerk and Dieter Doepfer have worked together for a long time.
As the only one in its industry Dieter Doepfer even may use their name for advertising purposes.

Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk) and Dieter

Dieter: One day i got a call from a Mr. Schneider who wanted to know if we could rebuild a special keyboard into a MIDI keyboard.
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.

Doepfer's miniature MMK2 keyboard for Kraftwerk

After the modification by Doepfer, Schneider was able to send signals to a sampler in which the sounds were stored.
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.

Dieter: "Since then, we are allowed to use the name Kraftwerk to the device. But we do not want to overdo things"
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).

"Designed in cooperation with the
German Band KRAFTWERK"

The first unit we built in cooperation with Florian Schneider was the MAQ16/3. We built some prototypes and Florian tested them and told us what we would improve and which features are not required.
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)

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.

We learned a lot about vocoders e.g. that a treble boost of the incoming speech signal is very
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."

Also see: Florian Schneider - Electronic Poem

Sources:
Morgan Karlsson

Doepfer Keys interview (by the same Florian Schneider)

Aktivitaet Online

Video: Charlie Chaplin Through a Doepfer Vocoder

As one of my earliest Quick Tips i suggested to test your Vocoder with recorded spoken word.
In that way you don't have to hold a microphone or constantly keep an eye your audio-levels.
The audio-example that went with that post wasn't that special, but here's another short but nice demonstration, uploaded by YouTube user WorksLimited.

Video: Charlie Chaplin through a Doepfer modular A-100 Vocoder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH1NlbDhPRQ
"Charlie Chaplin speech from The Great Dictator, slowed down about 10% and run through a Doepfer Vocoder. The results compare very favorably to units like the Synton and Sennheiser (in my humble opinion)."

Uploaded by WorksLimited

Florian Schneider - Electronic Poem

Here's another classic from the web that caught my attention last month, and it has an interesting story behind it too...

The (audio-) recording in the video below originally comes from a KEYS-Magazine demo CD, Issue 04 / 1996.
This issue of the magazine had an extensive A-100 test (page 44-50) in it, with statements from Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider (and O. Lieb).
Kraftwerk had worked intensively with Doepfer in the mid- nineties, for example on the Doepfer Mogli 'Midi Output GLove Interface', the MAQ 16/3 sequencer, the Doepfer A-129 Vocoder and some other (custom and modification) -projects. (more on this next month)

Florian Schneider (from Kraftwerk) spoke this poem on the answering machine of Florian Anwander, who wrote for the German KEYS magazine at the time.
Anwander played the cassette of the answering machine back in a Fostex 280 multitrack deck and did the vocoder recording with a straight saw wave from a Roland JX3P synthesizer as a carrier-signal.
No voiced/unvoiced detector was used; instead of that he took the high frequencies of the original signal, that were later added to the output-signal.

A Yamaha 2020 compressor and a noise-gate from Ashley were also used in this audiorecording.

Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk)
and Dieter Doepfer *

" Analogsynthese mit system 

klanglich, optish angenehm

technisch, logisch, funktionell

prototypisch und speziell

modular und variabel

leicht, kompakt und transportabel

für ein musikabenteuer

A-100, nicht zu teuer

midi-kontrolle vom computer

A-100 to the future! "

-translated into English:
Analog synthesis system / sonically and optically pleasing / technical, logical, functional / prototypical and special / modular and variable / Light, compact and portable / for a musical adventure / A-100, not too expensive / midi control from the computer / A-100 to the Future!

Video: Enigmidia / Florian Schneider - Electronic Poem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-gp5x1ujME
" Doepfer Vocoder, Digital ComputerArt by Paulo R. C. Barros
Florian Schneider, from Kraftwerk, perform a recorded test-drive of a vocoder to the Doepfer electronic instruments."

Florian Schneider seemed to be very pleased with the A-100, on page 45 of the KEYS-issue he writes:
" Up to now, I only had the chance to play around for one day with the A-100, but I can already say that Doepfer has built something really special.
The system does sound very good and does offer everything I do expect from a modular system - and that at a really reasonable price.
For me it is also a plus that it has turned out smaller than other systems, like some may point out.
But the adjustors on a mixing desk are even closer together, and you can also take it with you easily and leave the expensive rarities at home.
The vocoder has turned out really nice; it does really sound good in comparison to other vocoders.
After building a multi-channel filter (a very important module, by the way), it was only a small step for Dieter Doepfer to combine this with VCA's and Envelope-followers. "

He also shared a tip;
" On a modular synth, you really learn how the sounds are made.
I can advise anyone to buy a simple oscilloscope with the modular system.
This was also my start, I was fascinated to see; "this is how the sound looks here and after the filter it looks like that...".
You can really see principles here which you can also find in the whole world. "

* The opening voice is Gia Stemmer, who did the moderation of the KEYS demo-CD.
More info on the Doepfer vocoder system HERE

* Picture from Doepfer.de

Most Wanted VI - Special Vocoder MIDI-interface

I read the following text on one of Doepfer's A-129 vocoder system pages a long time ago, but it is still on Doepfer's website;

" A special MIDI-interface for the vocoder system is planned.

The basic functions are a 16-way CV-to-MIDI interface and a 16-way MIDI-to-CV interface (way 16 will be used for other functions like controlling slew-rate or voiced/unvoiced).

The CV-to-MIDI section converts the CV outputs of vocoder analysis into MIDI controllers which may be recorded by a computer sequencer. 

The MIDI-to-CV section converts incoming MIDI controller information into CV's for the vocoder synthesis section. 

Additionally we plan to store some factory and user definable 'vocals' in the MIDI interface so that you may call up complete vocals (like 'a', 'e', 'o', 's', 'sh' and so on) by MIDI program change events (may be we use another MIDI event type for this purpose). 

Thus the vocoder system will become a universal MIDI controlled filter system not limited to the standard vocoder features. "

Okay, i must say that it all sounds impressive and also very useful.
I do hope this module will be taken into production, but i believe this has been
on Doepfer's webpage for a while now, which makes me think that this module will probably never be made.
It might be in the Universal 12 bit AD-processor-DA module plans, because these things do need some processing power but i'm not so sure about that...
With all the announced features you could imagine this would not be a cheap module to make, but we'll see though...

Find more of my 'Most Wanted' posts HERE

Quick Tip III : Vocoder testing

Ideal for ( Doepfer ) vocoder testing;


Try feeding an audio-book or a recording of your favorite radioshow through your system while tweaking your vocoder settings.

Speech-only programmes are perfect for this purpose.

Short demo:
  In the Morning Vocoder test by NetPierre
* original audioclip from: http://NoAgendaShow.com / http://NoAgendaShots.com

Quick Tip II - Frequency Displacement ( Picture )

"If, instead of patching the outputs from the analysis section to their  'proper' respective outputs in the synthesis section, you swap them about instead, interesting frequency displacements occur in the vocoder output"

* from the A-129/1/2 Modular Vocoder Manual