Tour De France/Kraftwerk - (Circuit Tracks & Rhythm Version)

video upload by Guinan

"I was listening to the 50th Anniversary version of the album, ‘Autobahn’ by Kraftwerk and it occurred to me to have a try at one of their tracks.

By far the most danceable of theirs is the 1983 song ‘Tour De France’ with the 2003 Francois Kevorkian mix the best fit for the Circuit Tracks treatment. It also should be noted that the band were complete cycling fanatics even hosting some of their concerts in velodromes!

With the real Tour De France just about to kick off (5th July in Lille) I couldn’t think of a more suitable track, and I want to dedicate this with love to my cycling-loving father-in-law, Bernard.

Having influenced early 80’s electro music such as Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ the influences went in the other direction for this track. Hiring the famous New York electro producer Kevorkian to do the remix made for a fantastic combination. Francois was responsible for many of the greatest New York electro productions and remixes.

(a big shout out too to anyone who's here because they love the broom scene from the movie, 'Breakdance' !)

This era of Kraftwerk was notable in introducing sampling to the normally analogue instrumentation they used. For this reason, I’ve drafted in my Circuit Rhythm again in the same way as my recent version of Robert Mile’s ‘Children’. See here;

• Children/Robert Miles - (Novation Circuits... [posted here]

Everything you hear is coming from just these two machines (Circuit Tracks & Rhythm). The Tracks is programmed with the musical parts and is playing the Rhythm on two tracks. There are in addition some rhythm tracks playing on this machine to thicken out the sound. No other synths were used (apart from the sampled instruments mentioned below) and you’re hearing the straight audio direct out from the machines.

I loved the challenge of putting this together (see below for details!)
I hope you enjoy it too and check in soon for more tunes.

More details for synth nerds.

Amazingly I had just bought the Isotonik Sound Pack ‘Electro’ as I started to put this together. Lurking among the bonus drum patterns at the end of the other projects I found this very drum pattern! Got me off to a flying start guys. Another excellent pack too so credit to A Force Truly Evil @A_Force_Truly_Evil
Check it out here,
https://isotonikstudios.com/product/a...

There is one single trick using the ‘probability’ function that A Force Truly Evil used to create the zap part of the rhythm that’s so deviously clever I’m tempted to do a video on just this….

The bass on Synth 1 is my standard ‘DX-like’ Tracks patch but the original song backs this up on the high notes with a very 80’s slap bass sample. I used a sample I found online from a Roland SC-88. The pad sound is an edited sawtooth pad of mine but fattened out with a large amount of reverb.

The hardest sample to track down was the ‘harp glissando’. I discovered that it was actually lifted from the standard Emulator II library. After some searching and finding out how to translate Emulator disk images to .WAV I managed to squeeze it into the Rhythm on a loop. The tuning wasn’t quite right so I had to tweak and timeshift it (in Logic). I think I eventually got close enough. I hope it was worth the effort ;)

The breath sounds are lifted from the original (hey, if Roni Size can do it so can I! See ‘Out Of Breath’) and I spun a few bike wheels to get some chain and spoke samples to fill in those rhythm parts.
The track breakdown was as follows.

130 BPM, chromatic mode.
TRACKS
Synth 1 – DX7 bass-like patch
Synth 2 – detuned sawtooth pad.
MIDI 1 – routed to Track 3 on Circuit Rhythm (Slap Bass high notes)
MIDI 2 – routed to Track 4 on Circuit Rhythm (Sampled harp melody line)
Drum 1 – doubled bass/snare pattern (for phasing) and bike gear/chain sample rhythm.
Drum 2 – high and low breath sounds (panned left)
Drum 3 – probability-driven zap sample playing 16ths.
Drum 4 – Hihat
RHYTHM
Track 3 –Slap bass sample (originally from Roland SC-88 ‘Slap’)
Track 4 – Harp sample (originally from Korg M3R ‘HarpString’)
Track 5 – Harp Pentatonic Glissando sample (from Emulator II library)
Track 6 – Bass Drum and Snare pattern from Isotonik Circuit Pack ‘Electro’
Track 7 – High and Low Breath samples (panned right)

Tracks 3 & 4 were played from the Tracks, the remaining simple sequences were run on the Rhythm and cued when required (and occasionally mis-cued…oops)

Once again, I’m blown away with how close I can get this otherwise limited hardware setup to sounding like the original. Let me know in the comments if you have further questions and stayed tuned for more!"