Fairlight CMI

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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.

The first buyers of the new system were Peter Gabriel, Richard James Burgess, Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence, and Stevie Wonder. 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. 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 Security (1982) also feature the instrument, as does U2's The Unforgettable Fire (1984) album.

1 History
2 Influence
3 Features timeline
4 Sound clips
5 Artists using the Fairlight CMI
6 External links and references

[edit] History

The Fairlight CMI was a development of an earlier synthesiser called the Quasar M8, an attempt to create sound by modelling 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 soundwaves as a starting point. To their surprise the effect was remarkable, and the sampler was born.

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/50kHz) was available with the Series III.

The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (was 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 relative 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, "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 (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- An excerpt from Arpegiator (recorded October 1981), highlighting the use of the Fairlight CMI
- Problems listening to the file? See media help.

You're the Voice- the unmistakeable "clack-clack" sound etc. is a chief sound of the Fairlight CMI, as used in this John Farnham song.
A Touch of Paradise- This John Farnham song makes extensive use of the Fairlight CMI for background atmosphere as well as lead parts

[edit] Artists using the Fairlight CMI

a-ha
ABC
Bryan Adams
John Justin
Afrika Bambaataa
Jon Anderson
Tasmin Archer
Art of Noise
Asia
Jon Astley
The B-52's
Grandmixer JulianG
Daniel Balavoine
BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Lindsey Buckingham
Richard James Burgess
Kate Bush
Cabaret Voltaire
The Cars
Chick Corea (Elektric Band)
Jane Child
Coil
Stewart Copeland
Elvis Costello
Darren Hayes (formerly of Savage Garden)
Def Leppard
Depeche Mode
Devo
Al Di Meola
Dire Straits
Thomas Dolby
Dollar
Geoff Downes
Duran Duran
Ebn Ozn
Keith Emerson
Brian Eno
Eurythmics
Fleetwood Mac
Foreigner
Fumitaka Anzai (Japanese artist who makes many anime-soundtracks with CMI)
Peter Gabriel
Deborah Gibson
David Gilmour
Hall & Oates
Jan Hammer
Jane Child
Herbie Hancock
Heaven 17
David Hirschfelder
Human League
Icehouse
Isadar
Michael Jackson
Jean Michel Jarre
Jefferson Starship
Eddie Jobson
John Paul Jones
Kids in the Kitchen
Shona Laing ("Soviet Snow")
Robert John "Mutt" Lange
Julian Lennon
Loverboy
Madonna
Tony Mansfield
Paul McCartney
Ministry
New Musik
Billy Ocean
Mike Oldfield
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Pet Shop Boys
Petra
Shep Pettibone
Prince
Queen
Re-Flex
Romeo's Daughter
Todd Rundgren
Scritti Politti
Clive Smith
Stock Aitken Waterman
Sparks
SPK
Styx
Sundae Club
Supertramp
Thompson Twins
Tears for Fears
U2
David Vorhaus
John L. Walters
Brian Wilson
Steve Winwood
Stevie Wonder
Rick Wright
Yazoo
Yello
Yes
The Young Gods
Zee
ZZ Top

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 a lot of 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.