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, much to the chagrin of rival Martin Hannett (who left Factory Records after the company refused to subsidize his purchase of a Series IIx model mere months before Horn's production of "Relax" hit the airwaves).

The first buyers of the new system were Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Richard James Burgess, Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence, Stevie Wonder and EBN of EBN-OZN, who acted as Fairlight's New York expert liaison to the American musician community. 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. Alan Parsons made substantial use of it on his 1980s albums for the thick, layered sounds, on "Sirius" and "Eye in the Sky". 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 Peter Gabriel (1982) also feature the instrument, as does U2's The Unforgettable Fire (1984) album, and Public Image Limited's Album (1985), played by Ryuichi Sakamoto. EBN-OZN's AEIOU Sometimes Y (see ) was the first American single recorded completely on a Fairlight in 1981, released in 1983 by Elektra Records and Arista Records in London. Feeling Cavalier, EBN-OZN's 1984 album was recorded completely via Fairlight and the first American album to have that distinction.

History

The Fairlight CMI was a development of an earlier synthesiser called the Qasar M8, an attempt to create sound by modeling 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 sound wave as a starting point. To their surprise the effect was remarkable, and the digital sampler was born. (Analog sample-playback units using tape had been around since the 1950s, such as the Chamberlin keyboard and the Mellotron.)

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/44.1kHz) was available with the Series III.

The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (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 other than 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."

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.

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

Sound clips

Note: These sound clips require an Ogg Vorbis player. Click here for a list of downloadable players.

Jean-Michel Jarre - ArpegiatorAn excerpt from Arpegiator (recorded October 1981), highlighting the use of the Fairlight CMIProblems listening to the file? See media help.

A water droplet sample played musically. Composer: Greg Holmes - Original source

A sequenced, multi-sound song played on the Fairlight CMI. Composer: Greg Holmes - Original source

You're the Voice- the unmistakable "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

A video clip of a rare Fairlight IIL demonstrated by Kendall Wrightson at Syco Systems from a BBC MicroLive documentary can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP1IKdc4UI

Artists using the Fairlight CMI

a-ha

ABC

Bryan Adams

Afrika Bambaataa

Jon Anderson

Tasmin Archer

Art of Noise

Asia

Jon Astley

The B-52's

Daniel Balavoine

BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Lindsey Buckingham

Richard James Burgess

Kate Bush

Cabaret Voltaire

The Cars

Chick Corea (Elektric Band)

Jane Child

Vince Clarke

Coil

Stewart Copeland

Elvis Costello

David Morley

Darren Hayes (formerly of Savage Garden)

Def Leppard

Depeche Mode

Devo

Al Di Meola

Alan Parsons

Dire Straits

Eros Ramazzotti

Thomas Dolby

Dollar

Geoff Downes

Duran Duran

Ebn Ozn

Keith Emerson

Brian Eno

Eurythmics

Fleetwood Mac

Foreigner

John Foxx on The Garden and The Golden Section

Peter Gabriel

Deborah Gibson

David Gilmour

Hall & Oates

Jan Hammer

Herbie Hancock

Heaven 17

Human League

Icehouse

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

Matia Bazar

Paul McCartney

Ministry

New Musik

Billy Ocean

Mike Oldfield

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Pet Shop Boys

Petra

Prince

Public Image Ltd.

Queen

R.E.M.

Romeo's Daughter

Todd Rundgren

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Scritti Politti

Clive Smith

Stock Aitken Waterman

Sparks

SPK

Styx

Sundae Club

Supertramp

Thompson Twins

Tears for Fears

U2

David Vorhaus

John L. Walters

Kim Wilde

Brian Wilson

Steve Winwood

Stevie Wonder

Rick Wright

Yazoo

Yello

Yes

The Young Gods

Zee

ZZ Top

Robert Leiner

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 many 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.

External links and references

Fairlight Main Site

Fairlight Photos

Service and Repair Centre for CMI I, CMI II and CMI II-X

Candor Chasma : Information about Fairlight CMI and other vintage keyboards

Fairlight CMI History, photos and technical information

More history, technical info and links

Greg Holmes' Fairlight CMI page

Fairlight Week on Music Thing

Interview: Electronic maestros (New Scientist, 26 March 2005)

Peter Vogel's homepage with links to some Fairlight history and photos

Fairlight User's Groups on Yahoo

Clive Smith, early pre-eminent Fairlight specialist

Norm Leete's Sound on Sound article