I bought and restored a Series IIx and a Series III around 2010 because I was a child of the 80s in awe of these incredible machines used by my favorite artists like Nick Rhodes and Trevor Horn. I of course could never afford one as a kid but it was such a treat to be able to own them and work on them later on. These were futuristic machines with their massive CPUs and light pen interface that provided endless hours of fun an experimentation. And a huge shoutout to Peter Wielk (featured in this video) for his dedication to and continued support of the Fairlight CMI community. In addition to selling me numerous parts for my restoration, he was always willing to chat and provide tips and advice about my Fairlights (and tell some great stories about working with artists back in the day). This is a great video highlighting the history of two visionaries and their amazing invention that completely transformed music.
At the time i did not realize i was part of a music revolution. Fairlight was my first job in Australia I worked there from 1985 photo of the team at 10:53 brings me back lovely memories. The guy with glasses next to the blond girl was me, her name was Petra if i remember right Tuye was our team leader bottom left corner next to him Vivien we walked a lot to Oxford street Darlinghurst to catch a bus . Fairlight etched in my heart for ever.
Did you have a chance to meet Alan Galt? I’ve had a pleasure to know him, very briefly though. He was a real gentleman. He was also very modest and only briefly mentioned his role in the Fairlight development. I am just trying to piece together what his role really was, as something is telling me it may have been more significant that he had told me. There is photo on the web of the Fairlight team reunion for his funeral. That’s one sign of it.
These guys are still hugely under recognised for the tectonic shift they created in music. It makes me incredibly proud of them as an Aussie. I reckon they should be immortalised in bronze somewhere prominent.
@@looneyburgmusic That's incorrect. Soundstream created digital recording systems to digitise music. They didn't create musical instruments using analogue samples which were converted to digital, which could then be modified on the unit, to create other sounds and played, at different tones on a piano keyboard. There was a small cross-over in basic digitising technology.
@@anniedarkhorse6791 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 "Small"? How about massive crossover. Samplers, at their very core, are nothing more than digital recorders, which can then modify and playback what has been recorded. As you have already admitted
@@looneyburgmusic Are you 10 years old? Seriously, what a childish way of communicating. I recognise your type. The entire world knows that Fairlight made an incredible contribution to synthesiser development and history and you're going to be the one angry little incel who thinks he knows what the rest of the world, including the documentary film makers, do not. No technology is created in complete isolation, as any intelligent person knows. No one's impressed with you. I suspect that's why you started your bullshit in the first place. I won't bother replying. I've got a life.
Fairlight CMI was featured in an original song that I recorded back in 1986 in Brisbane, Australia. It was such a big deal to have that instrument on our modest little production.
Mid 80’s Stevie Wonder was playing a concert in the round at Wembley Arena, in the middle of a 3+ hour set the rest of the band went off for a break while Stevie stayed on to have a play with his new toy - a Fairlight. I remember him loving the wild electric guitar sound he was getting out of it. P E A C E : )
❤️ This is extraordinary ! These guys are light years ahead everybody. That's why their names are written on the history. I lived that time and I saw everything happening. 🙏🙏👍❤️
I loved how peter gabriel used the fairlight on his 4th album, security. Specially on family and the fishing net, i absolutely adore how the flute hits are sincopated in the intro, the utilization of the sample is just genius
that was my first cassette purchase ever. I still have it on my shelf behind me. such a timeless album, as was his 3rd self titled "melt". I'll never forget hearing family and the fishing net for the first time with my brother. Yes. the flute, the percussion, ha ha haaaaah!
Here's a couple of bits of trivia for you, firstly the Fairlight CMI actually used two Motorola 68000 CPUs which were interleaved to enable rapid processing of all the data, secondly the DACs (Digital to Analog Converters) were 8-Bit DACs, but the instrument was still capable of producing sounds with remarkable fidelity.
Interesting as the 68000 is a 16-bit data bus so it wouldn't be too difficult to go there DAC-wise. Just a bunch of resistor bridges. I suppose memory limitation was the issue.
@@v12alpine Memory was very much the issue for the Series 1. The Series III on the other hand had up to 14Mb of memory. Not huge by today's standards but when I was handed my development machine after joining Fairlight featuring 8M of memory, 10 6809 CPU's, 2 68000 CPUs and 256K of program memory and 120M hard disk I was comparing it to my similar vintage (1984) fully decked out PC with 256K and 20M hard drives running at 4.7 MHz.
@@v12alpine The DAC's on the series 1 were 8 bit chips and pretty high quality for their day. On the series III, they were 16 bit and were absolutely state of the art for the time. The post processing analogue circuitry was so closely guarded that the service manual did not include the schematic for the channel cards but included every other schematic. A resistor ladder discrete DAC would unlikely meet the required specifications. On the other hand, Peter Vogel created the original 8 bit ADC used for sampling from discrete chips. It was pretty limited in the sample rate as a result. The machine could play back faster than it could record - something that was fixed with the Series II.
It blows my mind thinking that virtually every single part of these instruments were manufactured and assembled by hand. Even if this fact of reality rendered the instrument unaffordable, the cost was justified.
Have you seen that guy who's trying to piece one together and having to remake parts and print parts -- those videos show just how complicated it is. It's like making an airplane cockpit by hand!
At the time, I thought it was shameless profiteering but this really puts me in my place. Must have been a nightmare logistically to produce these things.
Good thing few years later Akai, Roland and Ensoniq released on the marked more affordable samplers, and and we got another major wave of new music styles.
Assembly was the least of costs for these $50,000 machines, with sales volumes in the dozens. It was definitely the R&D costs that was the majority of the price. Rendered obsolete by the introduction of the Atari ST, at one 30th the cost, but they had about a five year window where they were making a mint from every major recording studio.
@@cygil1 Were they making a mint, though? As he said, they were hand-to-mouth all the way through until they went bust. The machines cost a fortune to buy, but that was because they cost a fortune to build, and they had no way of leveraging economies of scale.
Always nice to see documentaries like this! Jean Michel Jarre deserves to be mentioned in this as well. His 1984 album Zoolook shows some real creative use of the CMI…
It’s weird that ZOOLOOK is rarely listed when Fairlight is talked about. Perhaps it’s not as mainstream as it’d to be remembered ? I still think that even today it’s very difficult to « redo » Ethnicolor where, for instance, it’s quiet easy to « redo » The Art of Noise Love track (which is great !)
I had a friend who was a keen synthesist and Jarre fan. I remember the day we drove in to the city and picked up "Zoolook." I feel like he had a security cordon around him walking back to the car with it. His precious. At which point he had no idea how it would be. It was Jarre, so even I was able to enjoy it, but homes was blown away.
Peter Vogel - You are the man! This instrument was very inspiring. People could finally see some of the textbook audio principles actually working in real life. It was figuring out what the waterfall plot on a IIx was that made me want to learn about FFTs and DSP in the first place. We all wish that the CMI30A didn't get shut down by the current Fairlight.
I had the privilege of working on a couple of series 3 fairlights back in the day. Such impactful sessions as I was so in awe and never wanted to leave ha.
Would love to have a go on one of these. Doing it through a dAW is a bit soulless. I can see why people (such as Depeche Mode) went out and about with a mic and just recorded what they found as they wandered. !
Here is a bit of trivia: Al Jourgensen from Ministry once got a hold of one of those, completely reinvented the sound of the band, irreversibly influencing the genre that would later become industrial-metal. This piece of gear was a true game changer for sure. The thing was, all people at his studio were so high on all kinds of drugs, they couldn't really figure out the way how to leave the initial sequencer screen. So they built all of the songs around four bar loops they could fit on that one screen. That is how most of the album The Land Of Rape And Honey got made. True story, believe it or not. Priceless.
I can't tell you how much I love coming across bits of info online telling about how some of my favorite music & other forms of entertainment are made! This sounds like me when i first started working with a DAW, totally clueless but I made my music whether I knew how to properly utilize the program or not lol!
What you speak of is completely true but it was Revolting Cocks album Big Sexy Land a Ministry side project that was made under those circumstances with that instrument
Around the same time Bill Buxton and others were working at the University of Toronto on a digital synthesizer based on two DEC computers: an LSI-11 and a PDP 11/45. They called it one of the first portable digital synthesizers. If you had a van.
This is so cool. Amazing because not only was it a sampler, it was a whole DAW as well. What was Phil Collins' issue with the fairlight? He used a lot of electronic gear, synths, drum machines, etc. You think he would have used something as versatile as this. Although it was before my time, having relistened to Kate Bushes songs, they are mind blowing. Can you imagine the stuff she'd come up with today if you let her loose on a modern DAW.
Awesome doco. My dad used to help finance these for artists and studios and I remember him telling me that the soundtrack to Crocodile Dundee was totally recorded on Fairlight. Dad was a huge fan of Jean Michelle Jarre who I think was also a fairlight fan.
Although I never had the opportunity to use the amazing Fairlight. It will always have a high status and almost mythic quality in my life, because of the music it helped generate, which I grew up with. I think as an older high schooler, I eventually purchased and Emulator II, but, Wow, I just wish I could have afforded the Fairlight. Great job guys on bringing this story and its creators to RU-vid ❤❤🎹
Briliant! We used a Fairlight on our first recording working with Tony Mansfield in 1983, the song was 'Cccan't You See' released in 1984. We used it on lot's of our records, with Tony as our producer and later used one with Gary Moberley as our producer. The Fairlight was a real game changer!
To me this is THE definition of a DAW. Everything integrated. And it has the imho best sounding sampler of the early digital Sampling Era because of the way the CMI Sampler worked that didn't cause a lot of nasty aliasing to be heard. Which is why i am always amazed at what people pulled off with just 32Khz 8 bit in the early models. The whole architecture of the CMI oozes such a special type of sound signature that i really never heard on any other Digital Audio Workstation. As a kid the sounds made on this thing, followed me everywhere. And i bow in respect to the achievements of these aussie geniuses who had the right idea at the right time. Even sadly at a price that only the 5 wealthiest kings of the world could afford....
@@Helios824 it really is. And in my opinion it still does things better than modern DAWs. Especially on the Operating System aspect and how the sampler worked.
Thank you Kim and Peter for making the 1980's for what they were. Also thank you Peter and Kate for helping the Fairlight CMI become the success that it was. I am still astounded that you managed to ever get a machine built at all. You touched on how these machines were hand built. From the monitors to the lettering on the keyboards to the fabrication of the circuit boards everything was made by hand. You had no choice as Australia's thriving computer manufacturing base was non existent. From what I can see there is more assembly line automation in the construction of a Rolls Royce of the same era. No wonder the Fairlights costed a bomb. Considering that even today Running up that hill still manages to be one of the most popular songs ever says something not just about Kate Bush but also to the instrument that allowed the magic happen.
Fantastic video! That machine was and still is on nearly every song on my playlist for the last 35 years from countless mixtapes that went with me everywhere to my digital player, through my DAC to my Sennheiser HD600's and those headphones make the Fairlight the star in those recordings! A wee bit dissapointed that no mention of Trevor Horn in the success of that synth. for me he did more than anyone in the success of the Fairlight.
@@delskioffskinov horn was able to program the linn drum. that's it. w/o stephen lipson, andy richards and jj, his company would not have been successful.
I'm thinking you might not know what a producer does in the studio! I never said Trevor played the music in his productions I said he produced the recordings that contained the fairlight therefore he had the final say on what went into recording! If I didn't make that clear I apologize
As a budding teenage keyboardist growing up in 1980's England, the Fairlight was held in such esteem, that even knowing someone who'd used one, was like knowing one of Jesus's disciples. It was nice to see the story told. At the forefront of a music revolution, two guys with a dream.
I grew up on the UK music scene made with the sounds from the Fairlight CMI II/III's.... And the music conversatory I went to study at had a CMI III back in Australia... those were the good times! although, by then as the documentary correctly states, the other music instrument manufacturers caught up pretty fast... but the years where the Fairlight was the dominant instrument of choice were the glorious years in popular music!
I worked my first music trade show in Sydney 1979 and there was a constant crowd at the stand near ours. I caught glimpses of a keyboard and screen and heard real world sounds at different pitches. It was Fairlight of course.
I remember this item being shown off in 1979 by Bert Newton in an episode of the Don Lane Show. And Bert was sampling a dog sound and playing voicings of it on the keyboard, in different pitches. These early sampling synthesizers used wavetable sample-based synthesis. However shortly thereafter, samplers started using pulse-code modulation (PCM) for digital sampling. And in 1983, the midi standard GM 1 was released. There's also an interesting RU-vid video of a 1986 episode of the Computer Chronicles, showcasing MIDI sequences of that era.
Nick Rhodes REALLY showed off the potential of the Fairlight on the Arcadia album "So Red the Rose"- just brilliant! The tracks "The Promise" , "Goodbye is Forever" & "The Flame" with David Gilmour & Sting are stunningly good. All those incredible synth parts on that whole album were almost all the Fairlight C.M.I. & Jupiter 8. Nick was such a Synth Wizard back in the 80's. A true synth Legend. Glad Nick & Duran Duran will finally be in the R&R Hall of Fame this year! Well deserved.
Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel are the pioneers of modern rock by using this in their music. Especially Kate in her 1980 album Never For Ever, after that in The Dreaming and so on.
Amazing documentation ! I bought in the early nineties a cmi IIx with midi extension from a guy in berlin. it had the same black keyboard as shown hear from Herbie Hancock at 00:35 . I got with the cmi a box with over 100 discs full of samples, also many from Hancock’s future shock. 2-3 years later i sold everything to a french guy…
Technically a "light pen". It works by noticing the timing of the scanning beam on the CRT and capturing the values of the counters in the video card. In fact you didn't have to touch the screen at all. The light pen works up to about 1cm away from the screen.
Home computer magazines in the 80s often had articles about adding a light pen to your Commodore/Sinclair/Atari/Acorn very inexpensively. Like Paul says, then pen simply sends a signal to the computer when it sees the monitor's beam fly past its tip, and since the computer knows roughly where the beam is at any given time, the computer can tell which part of the screen the pen is pointing at.
@@patrickjhogan I remember seeing some of those articles. The hardware on the graphics card of the CMI had a special trick where it would invert the video signal whenever the light pen saw the scanning beam. That resulted in a kind of "cursor" appearing as a roughly 'D' shaped spot on the screen directly under the tip of the pen. Depending on the brightness setting of the monitor, this would even work on the dark parts of the raster creating a bright spot but more often it was used over the bright part of the screen to create a dark spot for the cursor. That is why the screen drawing controls (sliders, waveform drawing etc) were preferentially rendered with black on green, rather than green on black whenever it was expected the user could interact with the screen element. Text mostly worked okay (it had enough white/bright/green bits for the light-pen to pick up but "button" type controls were frequently rendered in inverse text to make them easier for the light-pen to pick up.
@@mvl71And of course Mike is the best musician of all mentioned here. I would like to see Gabriel or Bush playing AMAROK on acoustic and electric guitar.
Great doco. These guys are legends. I was offered Vince Clarke's Fairlight in the late 80s when he was selling it. By then I was already in love with the Roland D50 and lusting after an Emulator.
Funny how those who could afford to use these machines went on to make their fortunes while the makers struggled and ultimately failed to stay in business. Fairlight shaped the sound of my teens but I always thought the makers would be driving around in Bentleys, given their well-known customers. Here in the UK Trevor Horn and everything he touched had Fairlight all over it with the Art of Noise, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Yes and Grace Jones among others having that distinctive signature. There was a lot of cash flowing in the ‘80s and I expected Misters Ryrie and Vogel would be doing well from a wealthy clientele , certainly didn’t expect them to be making high-end instruments while spending their time largely just trying to keep afloat. Humble people trying to pay their bills while also being pioneers selling the future of sound to those who could afford it. Great story.
Kate Bush and Pet Shop Boys are two of my favourite artists and I know how much they used the Fairlight. I now live in Australia so great to hear that something that changed the world and my life came from here. I remember PSB using it in stage on Top of the Pops for one of their number ones. (probably You were always on my mind)
I'm surprised the Swiss duo Yello wasn't mentioned anywhere in this? They (for me) were the ones that were 'totally Fairlight' I think by their 3rd album? Their early stuff was good, but I was blown away by the sudden change in overall sound and production when Boris Blank got his hands on a Fairlight. Their most notable 'hit' was 'Oh Yeah' which started appearing in so many movies of the 80's and 90's. But Boris REALLY exploited the Fairlight's capabilities with such varying styles on following Yello records.
I saw that Tomorrow's World episode when it first aired and I was blown away by the "hello" part. As a tyro musician I realised instantly that such a machine would very likely remain out of my price range. Technology has changed and I can do all the sampling I want now using a laptop, but the Fairlight was the first one to take that step and it is still out of my price range!
Awesome little documentary. I remember sometimes catching the Fairlight hydrofoil to the city when I was a kid. They were a lot faster than the ferries. Boris Blank from Yello also had a Fairlight CMI, and those guys did some amazing work with it back in the 80s. Apparently he created a massive library of samples he recorded himself too.
Ah yes, the digital synthesizer that was used in Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill"! God I couldn't stop listening to that song! Thank you Stranger Things for introducing me to more 80's songs.
I worked for a while in recording studios in the UK and have seen many very famous musicians trying out/making music on this revolutionary piece of equipment
this synth was too expensive to make a significant change. only the richest producers and spoiled brats had this. the Yamaha DX7 on the other hand changed the sound of the 80s ending the analog era and ushered in the FM era that lasted until around 1993.
It’s always frustrating to see pioneers lose out due to money problems while the big companies take the idea and run with it. But without these guys we wouldn’t have the amazing music from that era. They deserve recognition and their place in music history.
The fairlight, IMHO, is THE most important musical instrument of the 20th century. Had they just invented the musical sampling instrument that would have been enough, but with the creation of the rhythm grid, the light pen, the wave display amongst many other technical inventions, the fairlight wrote the future of music composition and production. so much so that it has not, conceptually, been superceded since it's invention. *These guys simply don't get enough credit for what they achieved*. In every documentary that I've seen about the fairlight there's never been an in depth look at where they got their inspiration from for all of the technical innovations the fairlight bought which is disappointing; I would love to know more about this,
I agree. I have in mind to write a book about it. The unique combination of the CPU user interface, digital sound reproduction and very importantly and often overlooked, the incredible integration with a revolutionary sequencer developed by Michael Carlos in the form of Page R established the prototype of the digital audio workstation that came into it's own in the in the 2000's. However if you were very rich and were prepared to accept 8 bit sound, that capability was available in the late 70's in a form that a modern garage band user would immediately recognise and understand.
I remember the Hancock appearance.. then suddenly you had Matt Broderick showing off a smaller unit (not Farilight) on Ferris buellers day off.. it progressed very fast.. but wow that Fairlight what a robust tool. Art Of Noise pulled off the artistry in a way where I can still listen to things like Moments in Love today .. unlike some of the other Sample stuff. Thanks for sharing.. love the history of this unit
The Emulator II synth in Ferris Bueller was still insanely expensive and would have been the envy of most professional musicians. The irony is that Ferris says he wanted a car but got given the synth instead, when his parents could have bought him a decent used car more cheaply than the synth :)
First time I ever saw a Fairlight in concert was for Mike Oldfield at the Palais in Melbourne. Can’t remember what year it was but it was part of the promotional blurb that he used one.
NO LONGER SO... I'm an UDIO musician and I have a 132 songs.. None of them make using of sampling or sample playback in the same way.. They are closer to sound rendering or simulation.. The samples are encoded in a neural net and constructed by the AI as needed..
They created not only the sampler....but the PC as the main workstation....with a sequencer / with programable paches and you could store them digitally
The moral of the story is: if you have an innovative high end tech business like this and you don't create a cheap version that undercuts your own business, someone else will. Same as with Silicon Graphics for example.
Not exactly that undercuts, but the one that stays competitive. Like Cubase and Cakewalk etc with the emerging computes have done. So today we can have thousands of Peter Gabriels and so on
I have one particular memory of the Fairlight: When Mike Oldfield's 1984 Discovery Tour visited Odense, Denmark, condensing humitidy dripped from the ceiling and shortened out Harald Zuschrader's Fairlight keyboard. After having tried to make it work again with the light pen, he had to give up, cover the keyboard with a towel and the monitor with a drum skin, and then grab a sei-acoustic Washburn and play background chords.
@@Mannizilla I wonder if Bremen was before or after Odense. If it was after, either the short wasn't that bad, or they had replaced whatever part that malfunctioned very quickly. Mensch, es is fast 40 Jahre her. Die Zeit läuft zu schnell.
@@sneakyfox4651 Ich weiss auch nicht, ob es davor oder danach war. Aber es war klasse. Vor dem Konzert wurden Teile von The Killing Fields über die Lautsprecher wiedergegeben. Der Soundtrack war zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch gar nicht veröffentlicht worden, herrlich.
UDIO actually delivers on what samplers could have not really done.. This is the next shift in sound technology.. And like as with sampling and additive synthesis leaving analogs in dumpsters, the same will happen eesentially for everything with AI.. But more from neglect than from actual obsoletion..
That orchestral hit is on my handheld Yamaha QY 70 Music Sequencer. Now that i know where that sample is from.I'm going to order the Firebird album on E bay.
I bought the Casio SK-1 in these days. It was about 100 US-Dollars to this time. I think this was my first sampler and probably my last one, because than it was soon possible to do the job on a Atari ST or a any Apple Macintosh. Fairlight was for sure a class of its own in these days and only a handful of people had hands on this one.
