Fairlight-CMI

Hello Colin,

I was fortunate enough to spend half a day with a Fairlight and 
Peter Vogel twenty years ago.

I had been working in development on early digital synthesiser 
systems based on Apple II in California and dedicated digital 
equipment in Italy. We had made significant progress and were 
pleased with our efforts - until Fairlight.

The Fairlight did everything that ours did, most of what we wanted 
ours to do, and lots that we hadn't even thought of!

Admittedly you could have bought half a dozen of our systems for the 
price of a fairlight, but it was still an awe-inspiring bit of kit 
for its day.

Processors were running at 1MHz in those days. a great deal of 
elegance was needed to achieve the performance and versatility of 
the Fairlight. But the thing that impressed me as much as anything 
was the machine/man interface. The ability to draw two waveforms 
with the light pen, automatically interpolate between them, then 
rotate the visual representation of the waveform and draw a time 
line through the slices was stunningly impressive. No major 
manufacturer has ever improved on that to my knowledge.

Peter said that they had sold CMIs into physics laboratories as 
analysis tools. It inherrently provided fourier analysis and many 
other facilities appropriate to resolving sound engineering issues.

If money was no object you probably would have added a Fairlight and 
a Synclavier to your studio then. When the Yamaha DX7 came along it 
did about 5% of what the Fairlight could do, but it did the 5% that 
most musicians wanted and at a price that was far more attractive.

At the time I was playing with the CMI in Germany there were three 
of them in the UK. One was at a studio in North London and two were 
owned by musicians, I believe one was Kate Bush and the other a well 
known keyboard player, probably Kieth Emerson but I don't remember 
for sure.

So! Colin, I am sitting here at my laptop which has a processor 
running nearly 2,000 times faster than those in the original CMI, 
6,000 times more RAM and 25,000 times more disk space and I am 
writing an email on it! As the Fairlight was all about software is 
there not a software version available for a modern PC?

It's kind of a small group at the moment - there must be others out 
there that are interested in this landmark musical instrument.

Regards

JPT

The reason I called the previous posting "Divergent Sounds" is the 
following (I forgot all about it before): -

At a release of the Fairlight a speaker commented that this was the 
first instrument that he had encountered that did not tend to 
converge to its own natural sound formants. The Fairlight, he said, 
was divergent - every time a voice was modified it opened the door 
to a whole new family of sounds and encouraged the user to explore.

The speaker was one Dr. Moog. could you ever wish for a better 
endorsement for a new instrument?