Fairlight-CMI

Hi there,

This is a pretty interesting thread : I am a big Reason user and a 
Fairlight owner, and this is something I was thinking about also.

One of the important things about page R is that although you are 
restricted to eight tracks (on the series II) each of those tracks 
can contain different sounds on each tick. So If you wanted to do 
just drums for example, you can have all your drums in one track, as 
long as you only have one note playing at one time. If you needed a 
snare and bass drum to play simulatanously, you can use the sample 
merge function to merge a snare and bassdrum sample offline, and then 
use the composite sample in correct position in page R.

This system was also used in a lot of early sample based trackers on 
the atari and amiga computers, and if you listen to these early 
trackers, they can often sound very like a fairlight, with their 
rough lofi samples and tracked sequencers.

 As soon as you start using these composite samples, you tend to do 
your rhythm programming in a different way, which is why page R stuff 
can often sound more complex that it really is becasue of the 
composite samples.

To do this in reason, however, you need an extra program to premix 
samples, but this isnt really a problem : most wav editors can do 
this.

Then just download the composite samples into NN19, set the polyphony 
to 1 and program from the matrix sequecer. Its lot of work, but it 
creates the effect.

Its pretty obvious that the same sample mixing technique is ofted 
used for standad note sequences also, giving a simliar sound. The 
orchestra hits demonstrate this nicely : these can be layered up and 
used as a partly rythmical, partly tuned source. Any other chord 
cluster can and was used in a similar way.

Another important factor was that the samples contained ambiant 
effects like reverb and delay in the actual samples, and so when 
transposed, the effects would also be transposed, leading to a a more 
complex sound.

For example, an snare with gated digital reverb will get increaing 
gritty in in the reverb tail as it is pitched downwards.

Hope these hints help !

BTW for added authenticity, there is a Zimulator IIx refill for 
reason, which is very badly recorded, but gives you a lot of 
recognisable failight sounds to play with.