This year marks an incredible 50 years since Kraftwerk released Autobahn, the track that brought electronic music to the masses, and even the charts
#3
The world of music in 1974 wasn’t prepared for an electronic music revolution, nor for that revolution to take place by way of a track that lasted for 22 minutes and 45 seconds… about a motorway. But that’s what happened.
Up until ‘74, synth music had mostly been about Wendy Carlos’ take on Bach, early prog rock and noodling sequences from Berlin. With Autobahn – or at least an edited version of it – Kraftwerk took electronic music into the pop charts, and started a seismic journey for a band that would go on to influence many genres of music over the following five decades.
Autobahn the track came from the album of the same name, which was Kraftwerk’s fourth release after three albums of psychedelic folk recordings. While not a pure electronic track (there’s some wonderful flute and guitar in it) its insistent bass line, leads, beats and even car horn were synthetic enough to give this 22-minute opus ‘electronic’ status. It set a synth blueprint for future Kraftwerk releases, with the band quickly phasing out any signs of acoustic instruments in later works.
In this tutorial, we’ll recreate some of the key elements from the track including the filtering, detuned lead, repeating/delayed bass and even some of the beats using ZebraCM. We didn’t attempt the vocoder parts or flute, but wouldn’t be surprised if ZebraCM could do a pretty good stab of the latter if you pushed it. Anyway, happy birthday Autobahn!
Andy Jones
Andy has been writing about music production, studio gear and technology for over 30 years, having edited magazines including Future Music, MusicTech and (twice!) Computer Music. He says we can look forward to several ‘How to sound like Gary Numan’ features in the course of this series
> Step by step Recreate Kraftwerk’s Autobahn on one synth
1 The synths Kraftwerk used were legendary – Minimoogs and ARPs – but fairly basic, so we’re going to be using a lot of sawtooths. For our lead sound, start by selecting the Init preset, because that is just a sawtooth wave.
2 Turn the volume of the second oscillator up (it will probably be zero when you load in the Init sound) and then adjust its pitch so that it is four semitones above that of oscillator 1. We have the basis of our fatter, detuned lead sound already.
3 It’s still a bit too punchy, so we have to adjust the envelope settings, most importantly the Release value (set to around 45) so the lead fades out slower. We’ve also nudged the Attack value up to around 15 it doesn’t punch in so quickly.
4 The crucial part of the lead is the way it filters out in a kind of ‘eow’ sound. This is done my mo
