Kraftwerk - Technological Innovations

Technological Innovations

Throughout their career, Kraftwerk has pushed the limits of music technology with some notable innovations, such as self-made instruments and custom built devices. The group has always perceived their Kling Klang Studio as a complex music instrument as well as a sound laboratory, especially Florian Schneider developed a fascination for music technology, with the result that the technical aspects of sound generation and recording gradually became his main fields of activity within the band.

Kraftwerk used a custom built vocoder on their albums Ralf und Florian and Autobahn; the device was constructed by electronic engineers P.Leunig and K.Obermayer of the PTB Braunschweig. Hütter and Schneider hold a patent for an electronic drum kit with sensor pads, filed in July 1975 and issued in June 1977. It has to be hit with metal sticks which are connected to the device to complete a circuit that triggers analog synthetic percussion sounds. The band used this electronic drum kit on the album Autobahn, the following tour and it was featured on the BBC television series Tomorrow's World in 1975. On the Radio-Activity tour in 1976 Kraftwerk tested out an experimental light-beam-activated drum cage allowing Flür to trigger electronic percussion through arm and hand movements. Unfortunately, the device did not work as planned, and it was quickly abandoned. The same year Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider commissioned Bonn-based "Synthesizerstudio Bonn, Matten & Wiechers" to design and build the Synthanorma Sequenzer with Intervallomat, a 4×8 / 2×16 / 1×32 step-sequencer system with some features that commercial products couldn't provide at that time. The music sequencer was used by the band for the first time to control the electronic sources creating the rhythmic sound of the album Trans Europe Express.