KRAFTWERK and DOEPFER MUSIKELEKTRONIK

The co-operation between Kraftwerk and Dieter Doepfer
By Dieter Doepfer

Our collaboration with Kraftwerk started many years ago as we made some special designs for them (e.g. the miniature keyboards the use on stage for Taschenrechner/Pocket Calculator and a special phonetic keyboard for voice synthesis). 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 similiar cooperation - but not as close as with MAQ - was made for the SCHALTWERK.

The next coop. 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.