Hi,

I can see that here at the forum we have a lot of competence of reproducing Kraftwerk sounds. Has anybody been able to get close to The Robots bass? If not, is someone willing to try?

I did my experiments and closest thing to it was patch made with my Radias which I put into Origin. I've noticed that Radias is lacking some analog punch which we have in Origin. Using Radias as sound source and then adding filters from Origin and also compression or other Fx (and timesync from Radias to Origin) can give much power and presense to Radias. On the other hand Radias has qualities Origin hasn't, so putting those two together you can have very powerful monster with 8 part multitimbral engine...

Anyway I suppose that this punchy Robots bass is possible to get from Origin, right? Unfortunately my own skills as a programmer are limited for sure....

It seems to me that I won't get Robots bass sound from this thread...?

Speaking about Kraftwerk and Robot's bass, I've started a musicological study of this group and it seems to me that on "Man Machine" they first time used this bass sound. Also, very similar bass sound is also on song Spacelab. If not reproducing it, maybe someone with better ears and experience in sound design or just knowledge about Kraftwerk, could tell me what are the constituents of this sound.

Another thing which I am curious is that when Kraftwerk started to use sequencers or did they have them in the very beginning?

Hey - Kraftwerk first used sequencers on Trans Europe Express in 1976. Before the recording of TEE, they commissioned Matten & Wiechers to build them two customized 16x3 sequencers and called it Synthanorma.  They used this on the Computer World album too
http://www.elektropolis.de/synthanorma.pdf

The Origin's sequencers are based on the same idea but are far more powerful.

Many of the bass sounds on Man Machine (like on Robots, Spacelab, Metropolis intro, etc), use a layering of two synths, one used for an initial very short/snappy filter "chirp", the second for the main body of the sound. At least that's what it is to my ears. This is also how I programmed the percussion sound at the beginning of the song Man Machine.

I have a Robots patch for Origin in the works. Right now it is in the "fermentation" stage.  

Big thanks for information and link too! I look forward to check your Robot patch whenever you finish it, hopefully soon!

Playing with those early sequencers wasn't easy. I remember for example that they had problems with French electricity and also other things. They had to allways be prepared to "play by hand", like Karl Bartos puts it on this interview:
http://thequietus.com/articles/01282-karl-bartos-interviewed-kraftwerk-and-the-birth-of-the-modern