Recommendations of the editorial team

When the two founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider still appeared under the name of the organization, some listeners swallowed up: inside the Avantgarde genre. Then the two Düsseldorfers founded the Kraftwerk project and quickly caused a sensation: they waived the usual set-up consisting of guitar, bass and drums and performed with synths and a completely new, own sound world.

Which equipment helped the electrical pioneers to success, among other things, is treated in this article without claiming.

Power plant
Power of power plant “Autobahn”.

Future machine vocoder

You don’t want to believe what a meditative effect is a simple but well -designed “Boing Boom Tschak, Boing Boom Tschak, Boing Boom Tschak, Boing Boom Tschak” on the listener: inside. This may be due to the fact that from the start, the musicians not only alienated the completely new sounds at the time, but also voices and chants.

And that was the case with the help of different vocoders, all of which found their origin in the military and actually serve to code language first and to decrypt the recipient again. From this, power plant created entire choirs, distorted voices to synthesizers and crashed into the future machine so much that the singing synthesizer soon stood for the band. Kraftwerk used various models from Roland, which have now become classic, and made up vocoders from Ems. Today, these are mostly only to be found with a little luck.

Hence a different model: XILS Lab Xils Vocoder 5000 Order now at thomann.de.

Space Echo

The “Boing Boom Tschak” soon developed towards the deep, redeeming words “Music Non-STOP, Techno-Pop”. As a little helper, voices to distort to the incoming, the power plant served the legendary Space Echo by Roland. This is a delay effect that also added Pink Floyd’s sound. While the Space Echo naturally produced a warm, analog sound in the good old days, Roland’s branch Boss launched a true-to-original Space Echo, which relieves the attitude to the life of the analog Roland times quite well and is delayed by guitars, keyboards and voices for six seconds.

Amazon

The power plant is still on stage after 39 years of band history.

Children’s toys and a legendary rhythm composer

In the 1980s, power plant increasingly rely on peculiar noise sources. For example, they used calculators to create sounds and children toys served to create rhythms. In addition to this, different rhythm and drum machines used again and again, generated beats with the help of distorted voices and effects and even built their own electronic drums in the 1970s.

Among other things, one of the most popular analogous drum synthesizers, which has ever existed and who is frequently sampled today, found on the stage: The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer prevailed at the time where electronic drums, pads and (as possible) real-sounding of naturally generated percussion keep the position. The Roland TR-808 found its way to Genesis and Whitney Houston also uses the rhythm composer in “I Wanna Dance with somebody (who love me)”.

As not to be expected, this instrument is difficult to find and the purchase prices are quite high. For this reason, Roland launched the TR-08 rhythm composer some time ago. This should be sensitive to its analog predecessor as possible and give the user the feeling of having a real TR-808 under his fingers-not without going one step further through meaningful additions.

Amazon

Pioneers were preceded by power plant. They created a strong, rhythmic basic framework and let effects from space and time speak. Electric sounds everywhere, decibel in ultrasound.

ttn-29