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.
Kraftwerk used on stage a lot of Doepfer equipment, e.g. A-100, MAQ16/3, Schaltwerk, Regelwerk, several keyboards (LMK2 electronics with
a special lithurgic keyboardm, the special miniature keyboards for the Pocket Calculator song), MOGLI (Midi glove), Pocket Control, Pocket
Fader, Pocket Dial, Pocket Electronics, MTG128 (predecessor of MTC64) and many more.
