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The Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument) is a digital sampling synthesizer. It was designed in 1979 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, and based on a dual-6800 microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia.[4][5] It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed in the market with the Synclavier from New England Digital.
CMI founder Ryrie had started building synthesizers around 1971, using four analogue oscillators. Frustrated by the limitations of analogue synthesis, he contacted Vogel, wondering if he could help produce a synthesizer using a microprocessor such as the Motorola 6800.[6] The Fairlight CMI was a development of an earlier synthesizer called the Qasar M8, an attempt to create sound by modelling all of the parameters of a waveform in real time. Unfortunately, this was beyond the available processing power of the day, and the results were disappointing. In an attempt to make something of it, Vogel and Ryrie decided to see what it would do with a naturally recorded sound wave as a starting point. To their surprise the effect was remarkable, and the digital sampler was born. In casting about for a name, Ryrie and Vogel settled upon Fairlight, the name of a hydrofoil (named in turn after a suburb of Sydney) that sped each day past Ryrie's grandmother's large house in Point Piper, underneath which Ryrie had a workroom.[7]
By 1979, the Fairlight CMI Series I was being demonstrated in Australia, the UK and the US. In the US, demonstrations were covered by Bruce Springsteen's concert sound engineer Bruce Jackson, who was once Ryrie's neighbour in Point Piper.[7]
At this time the sound quality was not quite up to professional standards, having only 24 kHz sampling, and it was not until the Series II of 1982 that this was rectified. In 1983 MIDI was added with the Series IIx, and in 1985 support for full CD quality sampling (16 bit/44.1 kHz) was available with the Series III.[8]
One of the Fairlight's most significant features was the so-called "Page R" software, a real time graphical pattern sequencer, introduced on CMI Series II. This feature was often a key part of the buying decision of artists, and widely copied on other software synths since.
The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (a modified version of the Motorola MDOS operating system) and had a menu-driven GUI. The basic system used a number of Motorola 6800 processors, with separate cards dealing with specific parts of the system, such as the display drive and the keyboard interface. The main device for interacting with the machine apart from the keyboard was a light pen, which could be used to select options presented on a monochrome CRT display.
The Series III model dropped the light pen interface (the light pen cable apparently was one of the most fragile hardware elements in the system) in favour of a graphics tablet interface which was built into the keyboard. This model was built around Motorola 68000 and Motorola 6809 processors, running Microware's OS-9 Level II operating system (6809 version).
The Fairlight CMI was very well built, assembled by hand with expensive components and consequently it was highly priced (around £20,000 for a Series I). Although later models, adjusting for inflation, were getting comparatively less expensive as the relevant technology was getting cheaper, competitors with similar performance and lower prices started to multiply. For some years the CMI was sought after by those who could afford one, but competition made life increasingly difficult for the company. Fairlight managed to survive until the mid-1980s, relying more and more heavily on its revered name and its products' cult status for sales.
Fairlight went bankrupt a few years later due to the expense of building the instruments – A$20,000 in components per unit. As a last-ditch attempt to salvage some revenue, the final run of machines were marketed as word processors. Peter Vogel said in 2005, "We were reliant on sales to pay the wages and it was a horrendously expensive business ... Our sales were good right up to the last minute, but we just could not finance the expansion and the R&D."[9]
Ryrie subsequently set up Fairlight ESP ('electric sound and picture'), a company which sold the Fairlight MFX range of post-production audiovisual workstations. These were initially based on the CMI III, although later versions were entirely independent developments.[10]
In August 2009, Peter Vogel launched a new company,[11] first called Fairlight Instruments but renamed Peter Vogel Instruments in 2012, with the objective of developing a 'retro' CMI-30A (30th Anniversary). This system is supposed to have the look and feel of the 1979 CMI but will use the latest 'Crystal Core media engine' developed by Fairlight.au. Production is to be limited to 100 instruments.
In 2011, Peter Vogel Instruments (then called Fairlight Instruments) also released a CMI app for the Apple iPad and Apple iPhone. The app includes the complete CMI sound library and an accurate translation of the CMI's renowned Page R sequencer. It is also available in a cut-down version.[12]
Early users of the new system were Peter Gabriel, Richard James Burgess of Landscape (who demonstrated it to many British musicians and on BBC TV's Tomorrow's World), Iva Davies of Icehouse, Thomas Dolby, and Kate Bush. Raymond "Boz" Burrell of Bad Company bought the second Fairlight 1 to be sold in the UK after Peter Gabriel bought the first. Hans Zimmer hired Boz's Fairlight for many recordings during the early part of his career.[13] In the US, Jackson demonstrated the Series I sampler for a year before selling units to Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder in 1980 for US$27,500 each.[7] Meat-packing heir Geordie Hormel bought two for use at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles.[7] Other early adopters included Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence and Ned Liben of EBN-OZN.[14] The first commercially released album to incorporate it was Kate Bush's Never for Ever (1980), programmed by Richard James Burgess and John L. Walters. Wonder took his Fairlight out on tour in 1980 in support of the album Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" to replace the Computer Music Melodian sampler he had used on the recording.[7] Geoff Downes of Yes conspicuously used a CMI with monitor on the band's 1980 tour to support the album Drama.The first classical album using the CMI was produced by Folkways Records in 1980 with composers Barton McLean and Priscilla McLean.[15] Titled "Electronic Music from the Outside In," it was adopted extensively in electronic music courses worldwide. Jean Michel Jarre used a Fairlight on Magnetic Fields (1981) and also made extensive use of it on his The Concerts in China (1982) and Zoolook (1984) albums. French keyboardist Roland Romanelli used the Fairlight on his 1982 solo album Connecting Flight. The 1982 movie Liquid Sky featured a soundtrack entirely performed on the Fairlight CMI.
Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" and its parent album Peter Gabriel (1982) also featured the CMI. In 1981, Austrian musicians Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader started composing a whole symphony Erdenklang – Computerakustische Klangsinfonie.[16] This work premiered live on stage, using five music computers, during the Ars Electronica festival in Linz ,[17] and was released on LP in 1982.
EBN-OZN's "AEIOU Sometimes Y" was the first commercially released American single recorded entirely on a computer, a Fairlight CMI, in 1981/1982, released in 1983 by Elektra Records and Arista Records in London. The first American album recorded entirely via Fairlight was Feeling Cavalier by EBN-OZN recorded in 1983/1984 released in '84.
Producer Tony Mansfield used the instrument heavily on the B-52's album "Bouncing Off The Satellites". The band initially disliked the Fairlight, but guitarist Ricky Wilson died during the making of the album, and the Fairlight was used to make up for the lack of recorded guitar parts on the album. Mansfield had originally purchased a Fairlight CMI in 1982 for his own use with his band New Musik.
Jan Hammer used the CMI to compose the original soundtrack of the 1980s TV drama Miami Vice.
The British new wave band The Art of Noise and producer Trevor Horn used the instrument extensively. In the mid-90's, Art Of Noise member JJ Jeczalik would release a sample CD titled The Art of Sampling, which featured all of the unique CMI samples they had used throughout their career.
The last Fairlight IIx was given away through a contest in Keyboard Magazine in 1987. That particular machine has been in the hands of producer/musician Tim Curtis since 1990 and is still in use as of 2015.
The success of the Fairlight CMI caused other firms to introduce sampling. New England Digital modified their Synclavier digital synth to perform sampling, while E-mu introduced a less costly sampling keyboard, the Emulator, in 1981. In the United States, a new sampler company called Ensoniq introduced the Ensoniq Mirage in 1985, at a price that made sampling affordable to the average musician for the first time.
In America, Joan Gand of Gand Music and Sound in Northfield, Illinois was the top salesperson for Fairlight. The Gand organisation sold CMIs to Prince, James "J.Y." Young of Styx, John Lowry of Petra, Derek St. Holmes of the Ted Nugent band, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and many private studio owners and rock personalities. Spokesperson Jan Hammer appeared at several Gand-sponsored Musictech pro audio events, to perform the "Miami Vice Theme", as well as Keith Emerson, Stanley Jordan, Allan Holdsworth, Todd Rundgren, Jeff Baxter, Terry Fryer, Pat Leonard (Michael Jackson), engineers Roger Nichols (Steely Dan), Bob Clearmountain (David Bowie), Al Schmidt (Frank Sinatra, Diana Krall) and Cubby Colby (Phil Collins).
The ubiquity of the Fairlight was such that Phil Collins stated on the sleeve notes of No Jacket Required that "there is no Fairlight on this record" to clarify that he did not use one to synthesize various horn and string sounds.[18]
Coil considered the device unique and unsurpassed, describing using the Fairlight as 'An aural equivalent of William Burroughs cut-ups'.[19]
Options as of 1984:
Qasar I (1972)[20]
Qasar II (1972 / –1973[21])[20]
Qasar M8 (Multimode 8) (1974[20]–c.1980 / 1975[21])[22]
MUSEQ 8 sequence playing system (c.1974–c.1979)[23][27][31][32]
Qasar Polyphone 8 (c.1974)[33][34][35]
Qasar M8 CMI (Multimode 8 Computer Musical Instrument)[20] (1975–1977 or 1976[20][21])
CMI Series I (1979)
CMI Series II (1980)
CMI Series IIx (1983)
CMI Series III (1985)
CMI Series 30A (30th Anniversary) (announced in 2009, released in 2011)
Fairlight Pro App for iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, iOS 4.0 or later. (2011)
Note: These sound clips require an Ogg Vorbis player. Click here for a list of downloadable players.
Note: These sound clips require an MP3 player.
Two tracks showing Mode 4 (sampling) and Mode 2 (synthesis) and Page-R capabilities on a Fairlight CMI II and a small analog mixer
Devo used the CMI extensively on their 1984 album, Shout, but only occasionally after that (mostly being used by frontman Mark Mothersbaugh's music composing company, Mutato Muzika). It also appears as a prop in their home video release, We're All Devo, where it is used by Timothy Leary's character.
Jan Hammer was one of the most prolific composers to use the Fairlight in the 1980s, particularly for his work on the television series Miami Vice, for which he provided the theme song as well as an entire catalog of score music throughout the first three seasons.
The Fairlight CMI also makes an appearance being operated by Nick Rhodes in Duran Duran's video "The Reflex". Al Di Meola's Sequencer video has many shots of the Fairlight CMI and its software. You can see Fairlight CMI (series II presumably) in the music video "Etude" by Mike Oldfield (track from the album The Killing Fields, can be seen on the Elements DVD). A monitor of a Fairlight CMI appears at the 1985 music video "Machine Age Voodoo (Junk Funk)" from the Band SPK. It can also be seen in the Queen documentary "Magic Years" and on the back cover of Mecano's live album.
Herbie Hancock made an appearance on Sesame Street in the early 1980s demonstrating the Fairlight.
Jean Michel Jarre's 1983 album Zoolook and the single of the same name features the Fairlight's extremely famous Sararr lead throughout the song, predominately in the chorus and with the sampled voices.
David Hirschfelder made extensive use of the Fairlight CMI while recording with John Farnham for the 1986 album Whispering Jack.
Hans Zimmer used the CMI III to make the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning 1988 film, Rain Man.
Having incorporated the Fairlight extensively into their music in the 1980s, the Pet Shop Boys also repeatedly used it for their TV performances, especially during frequent Top of the Pops appearances. Chris Lowe can clearly be seen operating a Series III Fairlight (along with an Emulator II) on TOTP during the 1987 song Always On My Mind.
Sources
Citations
The original CMI started at about £18,000, going up to £27,000 for the Series II and finishing up at £60,000 for the Series III.
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