I recall in college having several conversations with people who gave up on reading Lord of the Rings because 'it felt derivative'.
Trying to politely explain to them that the fiction they had already read was the derivative work, while on the inside I was screaming:
Look here, you little shit.
I know we bristled at this in school, but I think there is in fact something to the idea of presenting a discipline to people in a Cliff's Notes version of chronological order. Otherwise you may never see the value in the foundational works in that area (or as the case here, artistic medium).
Roland did that a lot. They produced these generic "bad" synthesizers and drum machines that turned out to be unbelievably funky when abused by the right people.
It was a real next-level engineering super-talent. It doesn't even matter if it was deliberate. The fact that it happened so reliably is enough.
That's not next-level engineering. It's next-level marketing. The key thing about the [3-digits-here] series was that they were priced right. Not for Detroit ... priced right enough to sell enough of them, so that by the time Detroit (and Chicago) were ready, there were lots of them available second hand for very little money.
And thus: techno (and house) and their progeny.
OK, more precisely, that's not entirely fair. Early electro-funk (say, NYC 1978-1983) and even early hip hop did use these devices. But they were generally in studios and not widely used by everybody and their friend that just wanted to make a jam. By the time the 90s hit, the used market for 303/909 etc was primed and ready to burst.
There were a lot - a lot - of competing units that were also priced right, or even righter than the Roland gear which was never bargain basement.
Rattly cheap drum machines were all over the scene in the late 70s and 80s. None of them had the lasting impact of the 808 and 909.
There's a reason for that - the same reason that explains why the Jupiter-8 and Juno series synths are legends, while competing synths from Kawai and Korg are mostly forgotten.
Only in the same way that Led Zeppelin sounds "obvious".
The context from which you're listening to it is partly defined by it.
(I really don't want to get in to a "who is better/more important/whatever" argument. If choosing Led Zeppelin as a comparison bothers you, please substitute for taste.)
I didn’t mean the exact music as obvious but the style and tools they used. Same for electric guitars and the effects being used. Now totally normal but there was a time when people had to come up with that idea.
I'm not sure about that. Zep looted a lot of blues songs and just made 'em harder, and "hard rock" was a thing by that time.
I was a huge fan and they were my first "real" concert in 1977, at the infamous Day on the Green where Bonham and Grant were arrested for beating up a BGP employee. Get off my lawn! :-)
Interestingly enough the "scene" back then for them had elements that would have influenced and/or encouraged their direction. The Federal Republic of Germany actively tried to promote a musical identity that was a contrast to the GDR's populist music policy. The culmination of this was the electronic music studios known as WDR(Westdeutscher Rundfunk) and their radio broadcasts.
Hutter has acknowledged listening to those WDR broadcasts out of Cologne. Just to connect the dots Conny Plank, Kraftwerk's producer on Autobahn was an engineer at GDR. Karlheinz Stockhausen who was a Kraftwerek influence and hugely important figure in his own right ran the WDR. The WDR history and its importance to electronic music is pretty fascinating. You can read about it here:
Dusseldorf also had the Kunstacademie which was run by Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who regularly held "art happening." These art happenings were also some of Kraftwerk's first gigs.
Beyond that the whole German prog rock scene that sprang up around Dusseldorf and Cologne at that time with bands like Can, Neu! and Faust was all about experimentation.
While a lot of artists like Giorgio Moroder purchased their synthesizers and music equipment, Kraftwerk built a ton of it themselves - drum pads, robot vocalizers, sequencers [1], digital music programming, etc.
One of the biggest influences on everything we call music today. RIP Florian.
This is actually much more myth than truth. There may have been a few bits and bobs that they modified themselves but anything that was custom built was done by people that worked for them. Kraftwerk relied heavily on Moogs, ARPs and Sequential Circuits synths on those classic records. See:
They often designed the units in outline but other people implemented the ideas - like the Synthanorma sequencer, which was a product in its own right and eventually evolved into the Doepfer MAQ.
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.
Synthorama was created by Matten and Wiechers of Bonn[1]
Nobody in Kraftwerk was an electrical engineer. I am not sure how you "outline" a synthesizer unless you mean writing a schematic, something nobody in the band could do. I'm not trying to detract from their genius in any way but the idea that they created their own gear is largely folklore.
You can outline a synthesizer in the same way people that couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag outline software: by writing a specification of what it should be able to do. Implementing that specification is then the job of the electrical engineers.
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.
Except they didn't write down a "specification." They simply asked Matten & Wiechers to come up with something that could automate their tape loops for Trans Europe Express. Dirk Matten & Hans-Joachim Wiechers both designed and created the Synthorma to handle that task. This is well-documented. So no it was not the same a writing a technical specification any more than I'm writing a "specification" when I call my local pizza place and ask for a large pepperoni.
KW specifically asked for (actually were persuaded to commission) two step sequencers - not "something to automate their tape loops."
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.
>"KW specifically asked for (actually were persuaded to commission) two step sequencers - not "something to automate their tape loops.""
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]
Might want to step off your high horse, because the person you're responding to was pretty clearly saying two step sequencers as in a quantity of two, not number of steps.
Sorry, but this post gets a lot of things very wrong.
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".
>"What are the chances that Matten & Wiechers would have designed the Synthorma without Kraftwerk commissioning it?"
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.
Kraftwerk were great. But their greatness wasn't primarily in
making novel sounds. Where they really stomped on the terra was in making good music using ideas that various useless and unlistenable academic electronic music "composers" had been screwing up for at least a couple of decades.
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.
Those “academic“ composers had a huge influence on many musicians. They literally invented the techniques that groups like Kraftwerk could built upon. You might not like their music, but please don't underestimate their importance for music history! In fact, artists like Aphex Twin know very well how much they owe to people like Stockhausen.
Sure. I think at most we're saying the same thing.
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.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yes, it's obvious why Stockhausen didn't get much “air play“ - but how is this relevant? Are you suggesting a correlation between air play and musical quality?
No this is not correct. The drums were just a Maestro Rhythm King Unit[1]. The pads had no dynamics at all. The dynamics were basically a foot pedal that controlled the volume. Both the volume pedals and the guts of the Maestro Rhythm King are visible in their 1975 appearance of on the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" where they play Autobahn[2]. There was no "circuit bending" going on.
"Circuit bending" implies they're using an existing circuit. They connected the pads directly to the innards of the drum machine. I consider this circuit bending.
"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.
I seem to have "an axe to grind" because I'm a fan and interested in discussing facts about the group? I've shared numerous links in this post that would be of interest to any Kraftwerk fan. It should be very clear that I am quite the super fan. And this is distasteful and bad form? Wow.
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."
They were! The Maestro unit didn’t have expression inputs, or pad inputs. It only had rhythm presets that you couldn’t change and an external start/stop switch.
It was simple, but it required creativity and some electronics skill (or at least a lot of trial and error and soldering).
I can recommend this book to understand how you can essentially design a synthesizer without actually knowing any electronics. It shows a notation for expressing how to wire together various parts of a synthesizer.
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.
Still, using a modular synth well, which seems to be an extremely demanding art in its own right, is really not the same art as designing a synthesizer.
- Understanding how to design electronic circuits is necessary but not sufficient to design synthesizers.
- 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.
I'm not making any excuses for EEs who thought they could design a good synth without involving anyone who understood sound design. My eyes roll at the very idea. (I.e. I've fooled around with it myself, and the results were boring at best.)
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.
I think what Deadmau5 exemplifies is intuitive understanding to a degree where I think it wouldn't be very hard for him to learn how to design circuitry if he wanted to. You don't really need to be an electrical engineer in order to successfully build low frequency electronics. It is one of those fields where you can get a surprising amount of useful work done by roughly knowing what you are doing and accumulating experience.
...as long as you don't connect anything to mains power or irreplacable modular synths :-)
>I am not sure how you "outline" a synthesizer unless you mean writing a schematic
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.
I always thought that song was about the "love" one feels using a computer. The relationship between a programmer and a machine. Perhaps I was just hearing what I wanted to hear though.
> I always thought that song was about the "love" one feels using a computer.
It's definitely about both. They've always enjoyed writing songs with multiple meanings. Before it was re-written for the live tour, the original lyrics of "Radio activity" are about both Radioactivity, and "Radio Activity".
This article somehow forgot to mention their influence in the most commercially successful German rock band of all times: Rammstein, which made a cover of their song Das Modell.
Edit: As pointed out the english-singing rock band Scorpions from Germany is far more popular.
Me talking with my neighbor, who is telling me that some Kraftwerk event has been sold out in no time. My 6 year old son, standing next to me, saying: "'Das Model' is a great song by Kraftwerk". Proudest moment of my life!
My three year old nephew would ask to play the "robot man", as I referred to Kraftwerk for a while. Then would walk around swinging his arms like a robot to "We are the robots". I, having my "cool uncle" aspirations, was almost tearing up.
A true giant. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Kraftwerk, when it comes to modern music. They set out to create “Elektronische Volksmusik” and succeed spectacularly. I have been privileged to see Kraftwerk live three times, and those were some of the best concert experiences I have had.
I saw "them" live a few years ago on that 3D tour. By then it was just Ralf and the 3 other guys. At one point his equipment was getting messed up and sounded odd, you could see him getting visibly frustrated. It was interesting to see a human reaction like that from the robotic pioneers.
Ha - to be fair, it was, "Ralf, Florian, and two other guys" from the beginning - they made it into a quartet to mimic acts like the Beatles in a weird way. Of course, "the two other guys" deny that.
That's not actually true Klaus Dinger the drummer was a permanent member. There was even a brief period where it was Florian and Klaus Dinger in the band but Ralf had quit. And both Conny Plank their legendary producer and Ralf thought very highly of him. Klaus was known for pioneering a hypnotic minimalist beat known as "motorik." Klaus and Michael Rother left Kraftwerk to form Neu! another hugely influential German group.
Both Klaus and Michael left Kraftwerk well before Kraftwerk really found their sound (Autobahn, Man-Machine, Computer World, etc), and became that classic faux quartet I'm talking about - the two other members were hired, but weren't full members of the band. Ralf quit/rejoined well before this period as well.
Kraftwerk, in my opinion, invented modern music and will be the classical music of our times.
There have been moments of my life where I would listen morgen spaziergang for hours in loop, it was the only thing that could get me through the day without rage bursts.
It's my Linus cover.
Through them I discovered all the bands I love, from the most experimental electronic ones to David Bowie.
His contribution in taking "intelligent music" (sorry, can't find a better term) from something for the eiltè to something POP will be fully appreciated only when we'll be long gone.
Gute reise Meister
The power plant will be producing its magic energy forever
I love Kraftwerk and have done so for 40 years or more.
But this is not "tragic". People die. Florian was going to die. He wasn't young. He totally transformed the world of popular music. He had an awesome life, and now it is over. That's not tragic, it's just the nature of being alive.
The audience's flabbergasted reaction was an essential part of the whole performance, thrown up on the big projection screen from the live video camera! That was totally high-tech at the time. It looked so authentic and unrehearsed.
Seems to be the same performance from which the Ruckzuck vid comes, and in that one a lot of people look stoned. Consider that krautrock is a direct descendant of 60s' psy-rock.
(Though I gotta say that among early krautrock my favorite are Silver Apples, who were outstanding and far ahead of their time, but sank into complete obscurity after two albums.)
My very first splice job I did on a song was with Kraftwerk's Tour De France.
My friend and I wanted to extend the song so we could dance to it. So using a stereo system that had a cassette deck that could record from the turntable, I would cue the cassette to record, pause, then release the turntable, unpause the cassette, record the bit in the song we wanted to extend, and wash-rinse-repeat until we had the length we wanted.
This of course led to me down a long path of making beats, mixing tracks, and general electro-acoustic music shenanigans :)
It's also my favorite one. It's just magic. It's just as fantastic as the first time I heard it about 29 years ago or so.
(I also happen to believe that massive introduction of nuclear power is the only thing that will make the earth comfortably habitable for our grand-children, but that's a topic for another thread.)
An influencer in this context is someone whose IG feed, had there been IG back in the day, would have told you to check the latest from this crazy German band from Dusseldorf.
Ralf & Florian weren't influencers, they were inventors, pioneers, ground breaking visionaries (even if they didn't know it themselves most of the time).
Sorry I didn't mean influencer from marketing context. I meant influencer - someone who influenced others to listen/make/practice music in a new way. Agree that
"innovator" is the correct word instead.
So ignore the submission instead of downvoting it and flagging it for being against guidelines when this submission makes it clear that it’s just a preference and not a hard and fast rule.
I don't recall seeing any HN guidelines regarding acceptable reasons for downvoting. This makes downvotes ambiguous. It could mean that someone found the story/post uninteresting, or in breach of site etiquette, or that they disagreed with your position/argument but couldn't be bothered to reply.
Many HN users (including me) share your frustration with this state of affairs, but there's no consensus that this should change.
People justified flagging and downvoting the story at the time because there’s some guidelines around “no current event stories that you could read about anywhere”
It wasn’t just downvoting it was flagging it for removal. All of them.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
IMHO those guidelines indicate that neither Bryant's nor Schneider's deaths should be posted on HN. I can see why you'd be frustrated that one was upvoted and the other downvoted.
You might be happiest by putting this in the "imperfect system manned by imperfect people" bucket. One can only get worked up about so many issues before going bitter and crazy.
There isn’t a official HN guideline that clearly delineates between the two scenarios and says why one is allowed and the other isn’t.
My point is that it’s entirely subjective, but everyone flagging the Kobe story in January was yelling about how it broke site policy when it’s clearly just a preference thing.
Clearly, on a community-driven site, the appropriateness of a given story will be determined by the community's sentiment.
Nobody said the Kobe story wasn't important in the grand scheme of things; just not of particular interest to this community.
Whereas it's not hard to see why, on a site called Hacker News, the community would find noteworthy the passing of a pioneer of music produced on computers.
Saying this, as a HUGE Lakers fan, and almost as big an electronic music fan.
Kobe was incredible basketballer and story-teller, but his passing has no business here, there are plenty of places to remember him.
Florian was an engineer, a technologist, a hacker, a massive influence on many of us and how we approach our work. This is absolutely the right place to remember him.
It’s entirely subjective. If you search for “has died” posts you will find plenty of posts of other public figures who are more similar to Kobe (not technologists) than Florian.
Anyway it’s not worth spending more time thinking about I just remembered being taken aback at the forcefulness of the flagging and downvoting of all the Kobe posts in seconds like nothing I’ve seen before.
Just a note, Florian hasn't played with Kraftwerk since he left (retired?) in Nov 2008... so you wouldn't have seen him anyway. I sure hope that tour goes on once things return to normal!
I'm in the same boat. I tried buying tickets for European shows last year but didn't succeed. And now the show is coming to USA town, I get 4th row tickets and bam... Disappointment all around.
It had a massive impact on me in terms of opening my mind to possibilities of musical structure in `popular' music other than song form (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.).
Of course there is jazz form (head, solos on same form, head) and disco 12" form (the song, the dubbed out section, the reprise). And Kraftwerk's structures have a lot in common with the latter. But there is an incredible perfection and tightness (despite the extended durations) of form on all the tracks on that album.
This is very sad. Kraftwerk were hugely influential in bringing technology into music. If you have not seen it yet, the Kraftwerk Pop Art documentary from BBC is a must watch
Legend. I saw Kraftwerk live years ago and it was one of the most overwhelming performances I’ve ever seen in my life. Beneath the bouncy, poppy hooks there was a massive darkness — the pairing of visuals with the music really drove that home. (The only other live musical performance that I recall giving me a similar feeling was the band ‘Godspeed You Black Emperor‘, who also made use of projected imagery in such a tightly-coupled fashion.)
One of my favorite Kraftwerk songs is probably “pocket calculator.” [1]
I always enjoyed the part of the show where they'd pulled the curtains down, then when they were put up again, the entire group was replaced by robotic mannequins! Since their show was sync'd to the video in back of them, I'm pretty sure the music was all queued up too. They didn't really need to be up there at all!
I think only Aphex Twin pulled off such a stunt as well, where he walked to the stage, pressed a button to start the music, then walked off. But Kraftwerk would do it for an entire tour.
I've seen Kraftwerk live many times, and on two or three occasions they've played a bum note, or messed up the drumline, and had to stop and re-sync. So I can definitely confirm that they are playing "live", even for their most recent "3-D" tour.
(Though not, I assume, during the "Robots" sequence, which I assume is recorded. And I think that's actually the whole point of that sequence.)
Ah, another favorite. Computer Love is a brilliantly sweet song. It actually is a great encapsulation of their genius — somehow marrying human warmth with technology.
For the record, I agree with your choice of favorite song (alas, there are so many to chose from). That said, I think the German version is better. I think that's generally the issue since the German language seems more conducive to their brand of Gesamtkunstwerk.
I've also seen them a few times, twice open air and what surprised my most was the absolute insane sound quality. They are insane perfectionists and I was just blown away.
Arguably the most important and influential "band", which ever existed.
It felt high tech but low effort, and I know folks are okay with that, but it all felt so trade-show/product demo and not rock show. I would have been happier if it was a bar and not an arena.
This may be because: The Knife and New Order, though. Much better shows ..
I don't think they're that bad lately, certainly in the 80's, but their live shows these days are pretty tight .. and anyway, the cold hard precision of a playback-show like Kraftwerk gets tiring after a few tracks, unless there are other major distractions going on, which is what I found to be the case. It got boring to watch them checking their email on stage ..
Although they've at least said they've been working on music for decades, they've released so little in the last few. Perhaps we'll be able to listen to what they've been up to.
158 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadLots of things are obvious in hindsight, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of hard work behind them.
Trying to politely explain to them that the fiction they had already read was the derivative work, while on the inside I was screaming:
Look here, you little shit.
I know we bristled at this in school, but I think there is in fact something to the idea of presenting a discipline to people in a Cliff's Notes version of chronological order. Otherwise you may never see the value in the foundational works in that area (or as the case here, artistic medium).
It was a real next-level engineering super-talent. It doesn't even matter if it was deliberate. The fact that it happened so reliably is enough.
And thus: techno (and house) and their progeny.
OK, more precisely, that's not entirely fair. Early electro-funk (say, NYC 1978-1983) and even early hip hop did use these devices. But they were generally in studios and not widely used by everybody and their friend that just wanted to make a jam. By the time the 90s hit, the used market for 303/909 etc was primed and ready to burst.
Rattly cheap drum machines were all over the scene in the late 70s and 80s. None of them had the lasting impact of the 808 and 909.
There's a reason for that - the same reason that explains why the Jupiter-8 and Juno series synths are legends, while competing synths from Kawai and Korg are mostly forgotten.
The context from which you're listening to it is partly defined by it.
(I really don't want to get in to a "who is better/more important/whatever" argument. If choosing Led Zeppelin as a comparison bothers you, please substitute for taste.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Diddley
I was a huge fan and they were my first "real" concert in 1977, at the infamous Day on the Green where Bonham and Grant were arrested for beating up a BGP employee. Get off my lawn! :-)
I think it’s a sign of their brilliance. Their music is like an algorithm or scientific theory. Being more complex would not make it better.
For example (and IMHO) if you’re trying to make a techno track you’re not going to make anything better than Numbers.
Numbers isn’t techno. Techno as genre didn’t exist before some guys in Detroit heard that track.
Numbers is what techno wants to be. You can’t remake Citizen Kane and improve it. You can only do something different.
Which guys? I'd like to go digging in music history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belleville_Three
Hutter has acknowledged listening to those WDR broadcasts out of Cologne. Just to connect the dots Conny Plank, Kraftwerk's producer on Autobahn was an engineer at GDR. Karlheinz Stockhausen who was a Kraftwerek influence and hugely important figure in his own right ran the WDR. The WDR history and its importance to electronic music is pretty fascinating. You can read about it here:
http://120years.net/wdr-electronic-music-studio-germany-1951...
and
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/08/stockhausen-ph...
Dusseldorf also had the Kunstacademie which was run by Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who regularly held "art happening." These art happenings were also some of Kraftwerk's first gigs.
Beyond that the whole German prog rock scene that sprang up around Dusseldorf and Cologne at that time with bands like Can, Neu! and Faust was all about experimentation.
One of the biggest influences on everything we call music today. RIP Florian.
[1] - http://www.doepfer.de/maq.htm
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.
[1] https://sdiy.info/wiki/Synthesizerstudio_Bonn
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.
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]
[1] http://kraftwerkfaq.hu/equipment.html
What a strange thing to get uppity about anyway.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.maindragmusic.com/ca-1970-maestro-rhythm-king-mrk...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ2goij2J94
"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).
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.
"Crime, Travel, Communication, Entertainment"
I always thought that song was about the "love" one feels using a computer. The relationship between a programmer and a machine. Perhaps I was just hearing what I wanted to hear though.
It's definitely about both. They've always enjoyed writing songs with multiple meanings. Before it was re-written for the live tour, the original lyrics of "Radio activity" are about both Radioactivity, and "Radio Activity".
My family were lucky enough to have a BBC model B, a home computer developed for the show and the eventual proving ground for the ARM processor.
Kraftwerk and the Beeb were bound up in my head as a child.
For me Kraftwerk sound like the white hot future rushing into our world (...and also playing Chuckie Egg and Elite with my Dad!).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ybQWD6N6Zo
Edit: As pointed out the english-singing rock band Scorpions from Germany is far more popular.
Drummer Herman Rarebell's solo album "Herman Ze German" was a good clue :-)
s/German/German-singing and you might have a point.
(Or is Rammstein a much bigger and the Neubauten a much less significant act than I think? ;))
https://youtu.be/JgGuRKgvWQ4
Not only Kraftwerk are among my favorite artists, but my 8-month-old baby loves Autobahn.
Kraftwerk, in my opinion, invented modern music and will be the classical music of our times.
There have been moments of my life where I would listen morgen spaziergang for hours in loop, it was the only thing that could get me through the day without rage bursts.
It's my Linus cover.
Through them I discovered all the bands I love, from the most experimental electronic ones to David Bowie.
His contribution in taking "intelligent music" (sorry, can't find a better term) from something for the eiltè to something POP will be fully appreciated only when we'll be long gone.
Gute reise Meister
The power plant will be producing its magic energy forever
But this is not "tragic". People die. Florian was going to die. He wasn't young. He totally transformed the world of popular music. He had an awesome life, and now it is over. That's not tragic, it's just the nature of being alive.
He died of cancer, a terrible way to go and even though he wasn't part of Kraftwerk since 2008, I think his solo works were more relevant than ever.
Like this one
https://youtu.be/A5MtQMKa7ao
We lost someone who was higly influential and spoke boldly, but humbly, in support of the light side.
Not a good day for humanity, in one of the worst periods in modern times.
https://youtu.be/hWUiLJnEYJI
(Those audience reactions!)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ABOMrTgPNZA
This connection is especially obvious when you see the previous incarnation—Organization—in color: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eB-sl6ZLpo
(Though I gotta say that among early krautrock my favorite are Silver Apples, who were outstanding and far ahead of their time, but sank into complete obscurity after two albums.)
My friend and I wanted to extend the song so we could dance to it. So using a stereo system that had a cassette deck that could record from the turntable, I would cue the cassette to record, pause, then release the turntable, unpause the cassette, record the bit in the song we wanted to extend, and wash-rinse-repeat until we had the length we wanted.
This of course led to me down a long path of making beats, mixing tracks, and general electro-acoustic music shenanigans :)
Rest in peace Florian.
(I also happen to believe that massive introduction of nuclear power is the only thing that will make the earth comfortably habitable for our grand-children, but that's a topic for another thread.)
Which is why this is my favorite version of the song. They kind of evolved it with the Hiroshima accident.
Go wash out your mouth with soap.
An influencer in this context is someone whose IG feed, had there been IG back in the day, would have told you to check the latest from this crazy German band from Dusseldorf.
Ralf & Florian weren't influencers, they were inventors, pioneers, ground breaking visionaries (even if they didn't know it themselves most of the time).
Many HN users (including me) share your frustration with this state of affairs, but there's no consensus that this should change.
It wasn’t just downvoting it was flagging it for removal. All of them.
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
IMHO those guidelines indicate that neither Bryant's nor Schneider's deaths should be posted on HN. I can see why you'd be frustrated that one was upvoted and the other downvoted.
You might be happiest by putting this in the "imperfect system manned by imperfect people" bucket. One can only get worked up about so many issues before going bitter and crazy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How is contemporary music different because of Kraftwerk?
Answer these two questions accurately, and you will be surprised no more.
Hint: (a) not really all that much (b) completely reinvented
My point is that it’s entirely subjective, but everyone flagging the Kobe story in January was yelling about how it broke site policy when it’s clearly just a preference thing.
Nobody said the Kobe story wasn't important in the grand scheme of things; just not of particular interest to this community.
Whereas it's not hard to see why, on a site called Hacker News, the community would find noteworthy the passing of a pioneer of music produced on computers.
Kobe was incredible basketballer and story-teller, but his passing has no business here, there are plenty of places to remember him.
Florian was an engineer, a technologist, a hacker, a massive influence on many of us and how we approach our work. This is absolutely the right place to remember him.
Anyway it’s not worth spending more time thinking about I just remembered being taken aback at the forcefulness of the flagging and downvoting of all the Kobe posts in seconds like nothing I’ve seen before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mix_(Kraftwerk_album)
There is so much genius on this particular album. Critics weren't happy, but to me it was just perfection.
It had a massive impact on me in terms of opening my mind to possibilities of musical structure in `popular' music other than song form (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.).
Of course there is jazz form (head, solos on same form, head) and disco 12" form (the song, the dubbed out section, the reprise). And Kraftwerk's structures have a lot in common with the latter. But there is an incredible perfection and tightness (despite the extended durations) of form on all the tracks on that album.
Exactly. I think the reviewers just didn't get the whole concept.. just redoing old tracks, in a better way.
It's kind of the software way of life (v1, v2, etc - you keep iterating, by default).
It's also similar to how Mike Oldfield keeps working on variations of Tubular bells, and they do keep getting more and more interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaQQCW0wH0k
As I get older I start to appreciate the early synth groups a lot more. Spend many hours listen to Kraftwerk over the decades.
RIP Florian.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lVljmH0yUw
One of my favorite Kraftwerk songs is probably “pocket calculator.” [1]
1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eSBybJGZoCU
I think only Aphex Twin pulled off such a stunt as well, where he walked to the stage, pressed a button to start the music, then walked off. But Kraftwerk would do it for an entire tour.
(Though not, I assume, during the "Robots" sequence, which I assume is recorded. And I think that's actually the whole point of that sequence.)
Here's a recentish live performance of "Computer Love"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2SklZ5mNpg
I've also seen them a few times, twice open air and what surprised my most was the absolute insane sound quality. They are insane perfectionists and I was just blown away.
Arguably the most important and influential "band", which ever existed.
It felt high tech but low effort, and I know folks are okay with that, but it all felt so trade-show/product demo and not rock show. I would have been happier if it was a bar and not an arena.
This may be because: The Knife and New Order, though. Much better shows ..
/ymmv
Anyway, the show was great!
Great live show which was robotically exactly as I thought it would look like, complete with Sony laptops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0lIlROWro8
This song got some commercial rotation in Spain in the day, and the videoclip was mesmerizing.