Fairlight-CMI

Hi,

I bought the Series III machine that came from PUK studios through the
Greg Holmes site back in 1998 or 1999.  I still have it, and it still
works.  It's a Rev6.

Sadly, it didn't come with any DM samples or sequences.  The only
indicator that it came from PUK is a box of floppies labelled "TOMME PUK."

I bought it from a seller in Sweden, who crated it and shipped it to
me in the US.

Getting it working was kind of a nightmare.  When I received it, I was
really excited, as I had wanted a CMI since the 80's.  I'd never
actually used one before.

So, I hooked everything up, turned it on, and it booted.  I couldn't
believe how loud those fans were!  (Were they that loud when new?)

It booted right up, and I could drive the UI with the keyboard &
G-pen.  I loaded a sound, hit a key on the keyboard, and - nothing.  I
explored the manual and the UI for hours, but couldn't get a sound to
come out.  I hooked up external keyboards via MIDI, but still nothing.

This is where I guess most people would give up.  Fortunately, I'm a
computer engineer, so I started taking things apart and poking around
with a logic probe and oscilloscope.  I could tell when I hit a key on
the keyboard that data was coming out, and from the timing on the
'scope I could see that it was 31.25kbps - same as MIDI.  I'd later
figure out that that the Series III music keyboard just sends MIDI,
even though it has that non-MIDI connector.

So then I started studying the MIDI board on that back of the Series
III.  For each of the MIDI ins, I could see MIDI data going into each
of the optoisolators that are used to interface those ports - but
nothing coming out of any of them.  As unlikely as it seemed, it
looked like ALL of the optos were toast.

I had a few spare optos from some MIDI project a few years ago, so I
swapped out the one for the music keyboard - and that fixed it!  YES!

(I had to swap all of the optos to get the MIDI ports working, too.)

Once it was working, I found out that one of the voice boards was
dead.  Man, like I needed that.  I had spent a small fortune on this
thing, and it was hosed.

The silver lining, I guess, was that when I called Fairlight in LA to
look for a service manual, the guy I wound up talking to was Andrew
Brent.  As I laid out my debugging tale to him, I guess I convinced
him that I was worthy of a service manual, so he gave me one.  Andrew,
if you see this, thanks.  I really appreciated that.  With those
schematics, I was able to fix the dead voice board (it was a bad op-amp).

I of course complained to the guy in Sweden who sold me the Series
III.  He wound up sending me another drive full of dance voices to try
to make up for the problems.  Who knows what happened to the machine
that zapped it that bad.  I probably should have been more upset than
I was, but hey, I fixed it.

The machine now has a Horizontal Productions 32MB RAM board in it
(though it only sees 14MB, since it's a Rev6).

Joe



--- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "Lars Johansson" <lasse@...> wrote:
>
> Actually, they never used the Wave 2.2. It was a Wave 2.
> 
> At the time when DM bought the Wave 2 they was promised the
possibility to connect it to a Waveterm/Wavecomputer but that never
happened. Instead PPG brought out the Wave 2.2 in 1982 which could
connect to the Waveterm.
> 
> DM got so dissapointed after spending a ( for them at least ) huge
amount of money that they started using the Synclavier instead.
> 
> Later, they got the Wave 2.3 ( and possibly the Waveterm B ). On
Violator they used the Wave 2.3.
> 
> The Fairlight was used at PUK studios in Denmark when recording
Music for the Masses. Afaik they never bought one.
> 
> LJ
> 
> http://medlem.spray.se/waveterm/LJLab2006/
> 
> ----- Ursprungligt meddelande ----- 
> Fr�n: "jbgrahame" <jbgrahame@...>
> Till: <Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com>
> Skickat: den 15 december 2006 21:52
> �mne: [Fairlight-CMI] Re: Fairlight series III and depeche mode
> 
> 
> Producer Daniel Miller was heavily into the Synclavier, not the
> Fairlight. Black Celebration is absolutely chock-full of Sync FM sounds.
> 
> In fact, the distinctive FM synthesis of the Synclavier was all over
> Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration. And
> even back when they recorded Construction Time, they were using a PPG
> Wave 2.2, Emulator I and the Sync.
>