The Rowboats - A Kraftwerk Tribute

This project started (in 2010) with me loving the the original track The Robots by Kraftwerk so much that I started trying to create/imitate all the track's sounds from scratch only using Arturia's Mini V.
 
To get a better feeling of how my sounds compared to the original, I also began to build up the song in my DAW. All this was great fun! I sang along with the music and chuckled a bit to myself. After working with the project for quite some time, finetuning all the sounds and such, I suddenly realized the lyrics mysteriously had transformed into a little story about rowboats. :P
 
http://youtu.be/XVbufKKbRpg
 

This is very good and I like it a lot. I am a bit of a Kraftwerk fan and spent many years listening to them. What I love about Kraftwerk is that you can really see the black backdrop behind the music (space!) Somehow they seem to leave tons of space in there and you have been very true to that.
 
Think of the fact too that there were only 4 of them and even when you watch them live they manage to play all the parts between just the four of them. That can often help with your studio version.
 
My only crit is that they are not big on polyphonic chord sounds so much and they tend to mix any polyphonic parts way down. Your polyphonic parts are a little loud (compared to Kraftwerk's that is, not bad by any means) I just love the fact that nearly all the Kraftwerk music is coming from monophonic sources and I think that is the reason why there is so much space behind the sound. They don't tend to fill things in with pads and stuff. Another reason for this too is that polyphonic synths were not big at the time when they started out. They had to adapt.
 
They got standing ovations here in Australia last year and they brought out a three dimensional PA system (whatever that means!) with them. It was quite amazing apparently.

This is superb.   Must have taken a lot of work getting those sounds.    Great concept and production.
 
Following on from Jeffs comments about the minimal orchestration (if I can call it that) of Kraftwerk in general - how many tracks in Sonar did this take?
 
How did you make the computer-sounding vocals?

You done kraftwerk proud.  this is awesome!

I can't really say that I'm familiar with Kraftwerk's material, but I like this piece.  It's very well arranged and played.
Is the vocal effect something you used in Sonar or did you use an external vocoder?  Interesting.
 
John B.