Before you start commenting: 1. I am aware that the lowest bass note of Whigfield - Saturday Night is incorrect. I played it by ear when wearing headphones and for some reason it makes the real low notes sound different than they actually are. I can not correct this without deleting and reuploading the video so I'm going to leave it in. So a good tip (That I knew about but seemed to have forgotten in this case): Check your bass on multiple systems, it can do weird tricks in headphones. 2. The 'Da Funk' TB-303 bassline I show in the video is just an approximation to give an example of one the 303 timbres, it isn't intended to be an exact replica. I only spent a very limited amount of time programming that example and recreated it quickly by ear. This video is about the synths, sounds and techniques , not about doing covers, there are other channels for that. And a shoutout to @muzikxpress : thanks for letting me use a small part of your Jaydee interview. Check out the muzikxpress channel here guys, lots of interesting interviews: ru-vid.com/show-UCDqV1Nt74R7pNWLL6LjQjcQ
... and some day, Whigfield became a cannon, next to Bach and John Williams 😅😅😅. Thank you so much for this documentary. It sounds like you put a lot of efforts doing it. Great job!
That's an amazing trip back in synth time to the 80's and 90's , all sounding damn good with the headphones , The Fairlight was way ahead of its time when it was invented , kinda brought sampling to a new level , Mike Oldfield used it on some of his albums too , its always good to learn something new , brilliant synth history to share , big thumbs flying high !! 😎AK☘️👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️
Way back in the day, in the 1980's, on Saturday afternoon, I was given a tour around the Fairlight office in Sydney, Australia, where the their CMI's were designed. The guy giving the tour explained that for the piano sound, they sampled every fourth note on an acoustic piano for the piano sound. If they just pitch shifted everything, then it didn't sound like a piano. Ah, those were the "good old days."
Around '84 my friend had an Emu Drumulator that was mis-behaving so we went to the office of the importer in London to get a replacement. While waiting in the reception area I noticed that the shipping box I was using as a makeshift seat had "Fairlight CMI - Property of P. Gabriel" stenciled on the side ... possibly the most expensive chair I've ever sat on !
@@rowanjones3476 Hello Robert: No, they were not in Manly or Fairlight. The building I went to was very close to New South Head Road, in Rushcutters Bay. From memory, one of the principles used to live in Fairlight. I was surprised to find out that Fairlight is still running and creating audio tools.
1:30 When you said 'this synth is very rare...' I immediately remembered my first years of synths, how desperately I wanted to have such a vintage beast. But since I've seen restorations on channels like Syntaur (CS-80!) and Marcus Fuller, and having read about the tuning issues with these legends I realize I'm better of with softsynths or modern replicas
Interesting fact: Roland tr 808 and 909 were popular on early electro and techno scene not because they sounded great but just because they were dirt cheap
There's rumor that Roland even dumped quite a lot of 909s, because they didn't sell well. It took them quite a while to really become popular. When they were still produced not many people wanted them, because they didn't sound like real drums.
One that I found back when I had my DX-7, I discovered a patch that I think was called "Tubular Bells". It was an absolute dead ringer for the low-bell sound at the beginning of the Top Gun Anthem track by Harold Faltermeyer. It was an octave F# if memory serves. My DX-7 had some kind of memory expansion in it, so this may not have been in the original DX-7 patches. I should never have sold that keyboard.
The Fairlight CMI is also used by Kate Bush, and it is featured in her most famous song, Running Up That Hill. It gained popularity due to Stranger Things Season 4. You should do Part 3! There are a lot more songs to cover such as Blue Monday, Take On Me, Africa, Radio Ga Ga, and the Doctor Who 80s theme.
Thanks to your video, I finally found out what the name of the synth that they use in several musics that drive me crazy! It's Fairlight CMI! Thank you a lot, bro!
D-50 and Oberheim Matrix 1000 were my two favorite synths from this era. But so many great synths!!! I remember being at the LA Convention Center when the M1 just came out and the Korg guy was demoing it. He did that bit from the movie Jaws and nailed it.
@@F-Andre That sound was replayed on Synclavier in studio because MJ loved IT - said Bruce Swedien who was audio engineer with Thriller. So indeed there is not sample from the record, but only music.
An underrated sound I love is the PPG Choir from... the PPG Wave😅It's on Forever Young by Alphaville and See You by Depeche Mode... actually, I was able to recreate most of that song completely on a PPG Wave plugin! Pretty neat. I love fake choir sounds😁
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I recently acquired my personal "holy grail" synth - the Roland D-50 (in the form of the boutique D-05) and it still sounds beautifully crystalline. I'll probable be never able to build a patch from scratch though, not with that menu system :)
Talking about Roland menus...I have a very interesting but probably difficult Roland challenge waiting for me. A friend loaned me his old D-20 (which is absolutely not even close to the D-50 btw) and I'm going to try to create some new patches on it and see if it actually can do some really nice sounds that don't synth like general midi...
Yeah, I managed the M1 pretty well, but it has a very logical and easy menu actually. The TX81Z I edited using a contoller... maybe I can find something like that for the D-20 as well if the menu diving really gets in the way too much.
The Twin Peaks theme always reminds me of a Herman van Veen song (Een vriend zien huilen)... Same era, probably same synth :) Great content, keep it up!
I love the Korg MS-20 - I'd even go as far as saying it's my favourite monosynth. The artists that I feel have made the most use of it are Front 242 and the "Neue Deutsche Welle" bands such as Die Krupps and Liaisons Dangereuses. That distinctive filter and the oscillators detuned against each other give the synth such a distinct sound.
The Linn LM-1/LinnDrum was everywhere for a good portion of the 80s, I think it's prime material for a part 3 If you don't mind going back to the Fairlight again, I'm almost sure the glass shattering sound on Babooshka by Kate Bush was part of the Fairlight's original stock library The Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 has had plenty of memorable hits, but I can't quite find lots of sources on specific ones
4:56 ROLAND D-50 .... Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 and 4 ... major element of soundtrack.... I had hooked up 4 speakers to my mono VHS player and used the National Pansonic TV as centre and invented my own surround sound in my house .... way back in 1987-1988 I think this sound is heard in half a dozen movies with Bruce Willis ( before he became Die Hard action hero ) ( of course i know how many...I exaggerate )..
Great videos both from the 80' love that sound , I wish I have a list of most all the classics songs from the 80 ' with the synth they use and also the patches or the presets , do you know if there is any , keep doing this 80 videos , all the best
Just a note to the Roland D-50 : Jean Michael Jarre was a prototype tester of the D-50 an his album "Revolutions" is made to 80% with sounds from the D-50.
@@mtjoy747 Zoolook is a very special album. Jarre got his Fairlight CMI and, of cause, made extensive use of the sampler. I think that nobody else used the Fairlight in the way he did.
Vince Clarke used the Roland Jupiter 4 during his DM days (although he mostly used it monophonically - he's always preferred layering monophonic parts to build up intervals rather than chords played on one sound). For Yazoo, he mostly used a Sequential Pro One and a Fairlight. For the Assembly single and early Erasure, he added several Casio CZ-101's that he liked for their multi-timbral features. By the late 1980s, he was using loads of monophonic analogues, having become disenchanted with digital stuff.
Thank You so much for these wonderful videos: part 1 and part 2! I was curious if you could comment in another video, if possible and or demonstrate the Synclavier keyboards. Also if you could please talk about the Kurzweil keyboards as well as the ARPs and the Moogs too. Thank You again for all your hard and insightful work! Robert from Miami, FL. 😊
I have the Korg M1r and it's d/a converter frequency is at 32khz so that is why it sounds different than the vst I think, because the vst has whatever frequency that your daw project is using. So that is why I think it is better to have the original hardware. Also the TB 303 actually does sound like a real bass guitar if you play it through a bass amplifier and create a pattern that a typical basist would play. And it actually sounds like a perfectly played bass guitar, but if you just use a random pattern that a bassist would never play and only use the treble frequencies and distortion then it sounds like acid so the way it is used in acid is more like a sound effect I think.
I think the acid way of using the TB-303 is more interesting than trying to get a regular bass out of it though. There are synths that do a way better job at that. (The TX81Z for example :D ) That being said, with some nice distortion it certainly sounds great.
@@Estuera yeah I have the Behringer TD-3 and it's a lot of fun to play with "acid sounds" but I did hook it up to a guitar amp and it sounds much different like that, especially the accent function can make it sound more like a bass guitar than an ordinary synth because it puts those accents and slides in on selected notes which changes the timbre (if that is what it is called) of certain notes which an electric bassist would kind of do... I haven't seen accents and slides on other synths but the sequencer on my behringer ms1 does have accents. Ok my Korg volca Kick also has accents and slides.
The introduction sound from Michael Jackson’s Beat It was a Synclavier sample sound called GALACTIC CYMBAL from the demo record for the sampling keyboard. They just sampled the Synclavier demo record sound to a Fairlight CMI sampler.
Yeah well, the jury is still out on that. There's a whole discussion ongoing in the comments section of part 1 of these series: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Lsz0gGRWyvM.html
Beat it was taken from a synclaiver demo. The dude that made the demo is now included in the credits. Wasn't originally. The sound has been sampled in fairlight cmi and the EMU, but it originally comes from the synclaiver.
I made a video that touches upon this a little bit (at least the Prodigy rave years) : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XUWeD9OOn3Y.html There's a good chance I'll be revisiting genres that the Prodigy used to make and go a bit deeper into the techniques. (Spoiler alert: loads of sampling :D )
He used the sampling and sequencing features of his Roland W-30 on everything until a few years ago. Liam Howlett loves that machine so much that he bought Roland UK's last stocks of spare keys since he kept on breaking them!
You need to cover the very famous Casio CZ-1000 Organ Preset and the Roland JD-990's Thor Preset. Both are used very often in lots of tracks in the 90s
how about Holdin' back the years from Simply Red, love the piano track on there. not sure if you already did that one, I'll relisten to part 1, but that's a good electric piano from beginning to end.
Not a bad idea but for the M1 piano I have to dissappoint you. The M1 sounds are based on copyrighted Korg samples. Vital is wavetable based which, although these also can be (very short) samples, is a different technology. Recreating an exact M1 piano won't be possible. The best way to get that sound besides the hardware is the Korg Legacy M1 plugin. It contains the actual samples and sounds 99% the same.
Yes, but this question is about the M1 presets Piano8' and Piano16 (which most people nowadays will call the house piano) , not the M1 electric pianos that indeed have a DX7 flavour.
@@jonassteur9538 The only solution for now that is the most practical for me is to buy a Kurzweil 2500 Rack. It amazes me that still to his day nobody has been able to replicate the Iconic sounds from that Synth. Also Kurzweil doesn't have the source code for it either. The guy that did all the synth engine work(code) was some type of maverick genius. He did everything in his head. He died suddenly in the 90's and the source code with him.
Im also quite certain that joe hisaishi (composer of ghibli movies) used the fairlight cmi for my neighbor totoro. I can be heard quite clearly in the piece "not afraid"
That's a fact ;) I always negotiate things down. Still, these machines are getting rare and are in demand so prices will go up until one of those parameters change.
The opening notes of the Bladerunner soundtrack remind me of the cave and winter music from Stardew Valley, I wonder if he used the same instrument/ patch or whatever to make it. Love those ones.
Hello Estuera, just a little comment on Twink Peak's Electric Piano. Accordingly to a keyboard magazine article, that sound is a preset (n.18: El.Piano 1) of a stock e-Mu PROteus/1 . You can also hear that peculiar bass sound that makes the root notes while the piano is doing chords... That's a preset of the PROteus/1 too :) . That's so eighties indeed :)))
@@Estuera Still have the printed magazine somewhere and need to find it out but i perfectly remember the Angelo Badalamenti's interview and he personally mentioned the use of PROteus/1 as the mainstream synth for Twink Peaks main theme composition. If you have the chance to listen to the original song and the PROteus/1 preset, you'll notice that preset... Your rendition is nice indeed and a bit more plucked... I like it.
I knew I heard a voice like yours before. You sound strikingly similar to Werner Herzog, both with pronunciation and voice timbre - that distinct hoarseness. It is very pleasing to listen.
@@Estuera Herzog often self-narrates his documentaries. Search for example for "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Side note: you perceive your own voice quite differently to us. You might not feel that similarity.
Great video but the Whigfield bassline and Daft Punk bassline are slighty off. All the others are very good. What vst did you use for the latelybass or do you have the TX81Z unit?
The Whigfield bassline lowest note is one half note too high indeed. I played it by ear and got fooled when doing this in my headphones. There's another comment in this section talking about it some more. It's very hard to properly hear the tune of very low notes in headphones on certain volumes. I spotted it a day later when checking the video on another system. My bad... The Da Funk bassline I just tried to get close to but I didn't have all day and it's not easy to exactly replicate TB-303 patterns by ear. As the video is about the sound, not about recreating things, I accepted it to be 'close enough' for the example. As you can see in the video I do have an actual TX81Z in my studio. So what you are hearing is the real thing.
Maybe you could make some episode about Access Virus TI and Roland JP-8000 and those famous lead and bass souds, tracks was made in trance and house music industry. Virus is still great even today.
It's a suggestion that already got a couple of times and I'm certainly interested in doing something with either the JP8000 or Virus or both. It's just a matter of getting my hands on one of them.
this series should have been titled 90s presets, as the vast majority of the most famous 80s patches/presets escaped your knowledge and consequently this mini series. still was fun watching! but it wasnt about the 80s sounds, more about 80s synths being used in 90s music. to me the 90s is where music and the complicated knowledge of music and use of musicians ended.
