Kanalvogt SG | Kraftwerk - Neon Lights (UK '91 Concept) @KanalvogtSG | Uploaded July 2023 | Updated October 2024, 19 hours ago.
How would Neon Lights sound like during The Mix tour?
In an interview in Stockholm 1991, Ralf mentioned that they originally wanted to include The Man Machine and Neon Lights to The Mix. They didn't make their way to the finalized album because of length limitations.
There's a rumour that another reason for the exclusion of this song in The Mix is that it can't be turned into a dance song. Whoever made this rumour didn't think it through properly because nothing is impossible given the possibilites that appear as time goes by.
To turn Neon Lights into a dance song, Kraftwerk would have changed the drum beat and use a punchy drum kit. They would have probably used the kick beat that Fritz used in the late '91 live versions of Pocket Calculator. The riff synth, the pluck bass and the chord synth in The Mix version would have sounded like in the Minimum-Maximum version. The pad would have been a mix of the organ synth that was typically used in the UK leg and the Orchestron Vox Humana. The zap bass would have been the same as the original one.
For the UK '91 concept, I added Fritz' drumming and put a Fernando-esque quantisation on the pluck bass sequence and a "manually"-played bass in the improvisation part. I sampled the zap bass from Minimum-Maximum 5.1 tracks. The music can be still heard in the background, but it's not a big deal when the background noise is covered by the own instruments. Only in the quiet parts I had to use a replacement for the zap bass.
How would Neon Lights sound like during The Mix tour?
In an interview in Stockholm 1991, Ralf mentioned that they originally wanted to include The Man Machine and Neon Lights to The Mix. They didn't make their way to the finalized album because of length limitations.
There's a rumour that another reason for the exclusion of this song in The Mix is that it can't be turned into a dance song. Whoever made this rumour didn't think it through properly because nothing is impossible given the possibilites that appear as time goes by.
To turn Neon Lights into a dance song, Kraftwerk would have changed the drum beat and use a punchy drum kit. They would have probably used the kick beat that Fritz used in the late '91 live versions of Pocket Calculator. The riff synth, the pluck bass and the chord synth in The Mix version would have sounded like in the Minimum-Maximum version. The pad would have been a mix of the organ synth that was typically used in the UK leg and the Orchestron Vox Humana. The zap bass would have been the same as the original one.
For the UK '91 concept, I added Fritz' drumming and put a Fernando-esque quantisation on the pluck bass sequence and a "manually"-played bass in the improvisation part. I sampled the zap bass from Minimum-Maximum 5.1 tracks. The music can be still heard in the background, but it's not a big deal when the background noise is covered by the own instruments. Only in the quiet parts I had to use a replacement for the zap bass.
