Fairlight CMI

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A Fairlight CMI keyboard, featuring signatures from 43 celebrity musicians, composers and producers.
A Fairlight CMI keyboard, featuring signatures from 43 celebrity musicians, composers and producers.

The Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) was the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer. It was designed in 1978 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, and based on a dual microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed in the market with the Synclavier from New England Digital. Both instruments would be put through their paces by famed producer Trevor Horn, much to the chagrin of rival Martin Hannett (who left Factory Records after the company refused to subsidize his purchase of a Series IIx model mere months before Horn's production of "Relax" hit the airwaves).

The first buyers of the new system were Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Richard James Burgess, Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence, Stevie Wonder and EBN of EBN-OZN, who acted as Fairlight's New York expert liaison to the American musician community. Among the first commercially-released albums to incorporate it were Kate Bush's Never for Ever (1980), programmed by Richard James Burgess and John L. Walters, and Jean Michel Jarre's Magnetic Fields (1981). Jarre also made extensive use of the instrument on his The Concerts in China (1982) and Zoolook (1984) albums. Alan Parsons made substantial use of it on his 1980s albums for the thick, layered sounds, on "Sirius" and "Eye in the Sky". It was used on The Buggles' last album, Adventures in Modern Recording and, after his time with The Buggles, Geoff Downes went on to use it with Yes and Asia. Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" and its parent album Peter Gabriel (1982) also feature the instrument, as does U2's The Unforgettable Fire (1984) album, and Public Image Limited's Album (1985), played by Ryuichi Sakamoto. EBN-OZN's AEIOU Sometimes Y (see [1]) was the first American single recorded entirely on a Fairlight in 1981, released in 1983 by Elektra Records and Arista Records in London. Feeling Cavalier, EBN-OZN's 1984 album was recorded entirely via Fairlight and the first American album to have that distinction.

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[edit] History

The Fairlight CMI was a development of an earlier synthesiser called the Qasar M8, an attempt to create sound by modeling 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. (Analog sample-playback units using tape had been around since the 1950s, such as the Chamberlin keyboard and the Mellotron.)

By 1979, the Fairlight CMI Series I was being demonstrated, but the sound quality was not quite up to professional standards, having only 24kHz sampling, and it wasn't 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 (16bit/44.1kHz) was available with the Series III.

The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (a modified version of the Motorola MDOS operating system) and had a primitive (by modern standards) 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 driver, keyboard interface, etc. 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 green-screen.

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 in to the keyboard. This model was built around Motorola 68000 processors, running Microware's OS-9 Level II operating system (6809 version). One of the Fairlight's most significant software features was the so-called "Page R", which was a real time graphical pattern sequence editor, widely copied on other software synths since. This feature was often a key part of the buying decision of artists.

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. Fairlight managed to survive until the mid-1980s, mainly bidding on its legendary name and its cult status, sought after by those that could afford its prices.

Fairlight went bankrupt a few years later owing to the expense of building the instruments — AUD$20,000 in components per unit. As a last-ditch attempt to salvage a small something, the final run of machines were marketed as word-processors. Peter Vogel said in 2005,[1] "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 couldn't finance the expansion and the R&D."

[edit] Influence

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. Though the Mirage was essentially a poor man's sampler with significantly inferior hardware specs, at less than $2000, it was nevertheless sufficiently powered (8-bit microprocessor) to signal the start of end of the CMI. In addition to these low-cost dedicated systems, very cheap add-in cards for popular home computers started to appear at this time, for example the Apple II-based Greengate DS3 sampler card.

[edit] Features timeline

Quasar I, II, and (last) M8 (1975-1977)

  • $20,000 base price
  • Dual Motorola 6800 CPUs
  • Made by Fairlight and Creative Strategies
  • 8 voices (no sampling, just numeric additive synthesis with 128 harmonics)
  • Memory: 4 kB per voice
  • Synthesis: Fourier synthesis; dynamic harmonic control, waveform editing
  • Hole paper tape reader

CMI Series I (1979)

  • ~£18,000
  • The first musical sampler
  • 8 voices of polyphony
  • Sampling specification: 8 bits at 16 kHz (mono)
  • Memory: 16 kB per voice, System: 64 kB
  • Dual Motorola 6800 CPUs
  • Synthesis: freeform waveform via lightpen; dynamic harmonic control, waveform editing
  • Keyboard: 73 note unweighted velocity sensitive + slave keyboard
  • Sequencer: Basic keyboard sequencer, Musical Composition Language (MCL),
  • Video RAM: 16 kB (512x256 pixels)
  • Two 8" floppy drives

CMI Series II (1980)

  • ~£25,000
  • 8 voices of polyphony
  • Sampling specification: 8 bits at 2100 Hz to 30200 kHz (mono)
  • Memory: 16 kB per voice, System: 64 kB
  • Dual Motorola 6800 CPUs
  • Synthesis: freeform waveform via lightpen; dynamic harmonic control, waveform editing
  • Keyboard: 73 note unweighted velocity sensitive + slave keyboard
  • Control: MIDI
  • Sequencer: Basic keyboard sequencer, Musical Composition Language (MCL),
  • Video RAM: 16 kB (512x256 pixels)
  • Two 8" floppy drives

CMI Series IIx (1983)

  • ~£27,000
  • 8 voices of polyphony
  • Sampling specification: 8 bits at 2100 Hz to 30.2 kHz (mono)
  • Memory: 16 kB per voice, System: 256 kB
  • Dual Motorola 6809 CPUs
  • Synthesis: freeform waveform via lightpen; dynamic harmonic control, waveform editing
  • Keyboard: 73 note unweighted velocity sensitive + slave keyboard
  • Control: MIDI, SMPTE
  • Sequencer: Page R, Basic keyboard sequencer, Musical Composition Language (MCL),
  • Video RAM 16 kB (512x256 pixels)
  • Two 8" floppy drives

CMI Series III (1985)

  • £50,000
  • 16 voices of polyphony (expandable)
  • Sampling specification: 16 bits at 100 kHz (mono) or 50 kHz (stereo), System: 356 kB
  • Memory: 14 MB, expandable to 32 MB and maximum 64 MB on last hard revision (RAM RAM disk)
  • Dual Motorola 6809 CPUs, and one 6809 CPU for each voice card, one Motorola 68000 (to 68020) for waveform processor card
  • Synthesis: freeform waveform via graphics tablet; FFT; waveform editing
  • Keyboard: 73 note unweighted velocity sensitive (MIDI compatible)
  • Control: MIDI, SMPTE
  • Sequencer: CAPS (Composer, Arranger, Performer Sequencer), 80 track polyphonic, Musical Composition Language (MCL),
  • Hard drive and Tape DC600 Streamer (ESDI, SCSI), one 8" floppy drive

[edit] Sound clips

Note: These sound clips require an Ogg Vorbis player. Click here for a list of downloadable players.

Jean-Michel Jarre - Arpegiator

An excerpt from Arpegiator (recorded October 1981), highlighting the use of the Fairlight CMI
Problems listening to the file? See media help.

[edit] Artists using the Fairlight CMI


A Fairlight CMI can be seen in the Devo film We Are Devo and in Jan Hammer's music video for the Miami Vice theme song. It 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.

David Hirschfelder made extensive use of the Fairlight CMI while recording with John Farnham for the 1986 album Whispering Jack.

According to Tony Wilson, one of the reasons Martin Hannett left Factory Records and filed a lawsuit against them, was because they decided to invest in The Haçienda instead of buying him a Fairlight.

[edit] External links and references

  1. ^ Interview: Electronic maestros (New Scientist, 26 March 2005)
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