Fairlight-CMI

Ok, reporting back:

I took Arron's advice and did some composite sampling w/ Reason and
Ableton Live last night.  And I have to say, the sound almost
immediately got a lot closer to what I've heard on records made with
Fairlights.  And I've been working on this for months.

As for the drums, I took a kit with a Fairlight bass drum, snare and
hi-hat, put a gated reverb on it, sampled into Live all the various
combinations (BD-Sn, Sn-HH, etc.), and put it back into Reason in both
a ReDrum drum machine emulator and NN-19 sampler.  Using the Matrix
sequencer with the NN-19, the results were pretty good, but actually
programming in the beats was a bit cumbersome and not exactly user
friendly (on the bright side there, it's still probably easier to
program than the Page R was, based on what I've read).  I suspect the
key to making this even more effective is to spread out the composite
drum kit over the entire keyboard, so all the sounds can have an
octave or more of pitches to hit.

Composite sampling pitched sounds was perhaps even more interesting. 
Especially if you sample in blasts like ORCH 5 chords or something
with gated reverb, you get that really "cut-uppy" sound so many
Fairlight records have.  It might be interesting to do major, minor,
seventh and suspended chords of certain blasts.

Maybe this is a good place to ask: what OTHER tricks did people do on
the Fairlight?  I imagine there's a lot of reversing of samples, as on
a lot of these records you hear sounds fading in rapidly...


--- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "matthew_weiner_2000"
<matthew.weiner@...> wrote:
>
> Arron,
> 
> Outstanding insights there — despite understanding the polyphony
> limitations of the machine, the composite sample thing was something
> never occurred to me (much less adding in the reverb and all or doing
> chords that way).  I will try it this evening and report back!  
> 
> --- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "Eight to Infinity (Arron)"
> <arron@> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
>