This was my childhood dream owning this piece of equipment, i remember showing my dad the review in 1981 i wanted one so badly i cried for days. I became a musician by carving my first instrument out of a willow tree, They were the best years of my life.
Yea, if Dad sold the house to buy you one, things may have turned out very differently. Then again, assuming it never rained, probably would've been a solid investment opportunity.
I can't be the only one who's first exposure to unapologetically electronic, synthesised pop music was the Petshop boys. New Order seem to get all the votes but Petshop boys were straight electronic, keyboard, synth from the start. In a mainstream pop outfit. They didn't present themselves alongside a fake band, fake guitars, etc. They weren't searching for instrument realism, a band on the cheap. They had their own recognisable sound. I had forgotten how much they influenced me until I listened to the Actually album again
I guess it depends on how old you are mate. Me, I remember early 80s synth music by the likes of Depeche Mode & Yazoo etc but didn't really like it. Pet Shop Boys appeared when I was 16 with west end girls, then grew enormously in the following 2 years up until always on my mind topped the Xmas charts, and I immediately liked them. Probably because I was more of an intellectually introspective introvert loner type of character, and also they made songs and albums that I thought were good at the time. I kinda drifted away from their music at 21, Behaviour was the last record I bought, and enjoyed, then I got into New Order, then indie, then older rock & blues type stuff and forgot about the Pet Shop Boys....but nowadays as a guitarist I've found myself arranging the songs of theirs that I liked back then and playing them in more of a rockier style, which I'm finding very enjoyable.
I had the rare opportunity of not being aware of them until years into my adulthood. Grew up with New Order and other 80's music but discovered PSB pretty late, really a privilege to re-live the music and such an extensive back catalogue.
I think new order get more of a rep cos they actually had no qualms about doing any of this live (even to their detriment in some cases!) Psb, as good as they were, seldom performed live until the 90s and even then emphasis was put more on the theatrics than the actual musical output.
Back then they couldn't afford one it was my Iix used to program and record the parts and most done in my studio initially I also played and created the piano parts...
how was the infamous what i would call hammer noise on every beat done. im guessing it was a similar process as depeche mode did with recording various noises
Hi Blue Weaver, I purchased a Series III from Ross Cullum and Chris Hughes about 13 years ago. (not working though I had to get it repaired by a genius in Reading) It was one that had been modified and built Into a cabinet on wheels by Peter Wielk. Anyway long Story short. The very thick operators manual it came with has your name written on it in a black Marker pen. Just wondering if you know anything about the history of this particular Fairlight?
cool to watch this old tech in action. way back... things were so weird :) the sequencer looks pretty simple and easy. today they even more simple but can do much more. easy to use. as always. or this old stuff was hard ? LOL
That snare sounds like the Roland R8 snare, the tambourine also sounds Roland-like. Maybe Roland took some of sounds from Fairlight, I know the Sara voice and Rhodes piano came from Fairlight.
I have an extensive library of the sounds this thing used, unfortunately I can't seem to find them so I can transfer this to Reason 4 or Logic. What is the mallet/metal hit and snare used??
They got a good advance from EMI/PARLOPHONE perhaps, for the first album? Or maybe the one we heard on the album belonged to stephen hague, who produced the first album.
Great piece of video. Searching through the Vogel CMI app on the iPad the lower four samples are missing - particularly BLIP which is the most distinctive sample of the piece I think. Are these PSB specific sounds?
Funnier 26 There is no VST able to reproduce the sound of the CMI. Playing any samples from this venerable machine on a software sampler sounds awful and flat. Stop thinking that VST can do anything and everything.
Angueran DeLaMouliniere These are 8-bit machines, so what you're saying is that a 24-bit VST is somehow going to ruin an 8-bit sound? What happens between the numbers, stays between the numbers.
You can emulate anything, you can sample everything. If its something i've learneded all the years i've produced music is that anything is possible to do with enough computing power even analog...
Victor Hansson Wrong and wrong. Learn the basics of signal processing. There is NO exact emulation of an analog filter in digital domain. Just look how many people are claiming every year that they finally made an exact model of Moog filter... saying next year that the new emulation is even better. Most people who played a VST version of Minimoog, Jupiter or Prophet never heard the analog version, but they believe what vendors are saying. That does not mean that analog sound is better than digital sound, or vice versa, but they sound different. Period.
can somebody tell me how these two people with no track record could afford the £30k needed for a CMI? i mean back in the day, £30k would buy you a four bedroom house in a nice part of my southern town with 100 foot back garden...
I do see the vintage charm but I wonder how could it have been used in so many music productions in the 80s when the sound quality is a bit bad...........
