This video shows some sounds from the Fairliht CMI IIX sampler from 1983 which used 8 inch floppy disks to store 8 bit samples. This particular machine has gone on world tours with Michael Jackson and other groups.
A generation later the Fairlight CMI is still one of the most awesome musical instruments ever conceived. Your demonstration brings out the best in it.
THIS is the sounds I'm after, those digital artifacts and harmonics in the low register add so much character and crunch, throw some light reverb on and OOMF it sounds lovely
@@williamtopping i dont particularly like this line of thinking, because it's basically saying you can't appreciate or utilize sounds unless they come from the original instrument. Well, the original instrument is obsolete, insanely expensive and rare. Yet, thanks to the incredible work of sound designers, they are able to reproduce those sounds thanks to modern processing power, allowing many more people to enjoy and experiment with these legendary synths.
@@esp-music Yes but they don't sound exactly the same. The 'rolled-off' and graininess nature of the Fairlight is one of the things that gives it so much character and makes it sit behind vocals without it being overbearing.
It's really amazing how far and fast synth tech moved in the 80's - 90's era. Not even a decade after the first release of the CMI there were far more affordable samplers, which were just as capable, on the market... What a time to be alive and collecting gear.
By the mid 90s you could do it all on a Soundblaster card in your PC. They were indeed amazing times. For me the most exciting computing era was the 90s, the rate of improvement was phenomenal.
That Michael Jackson disk was kind of interesting. The original sound on the record was not done with a Fairlight, but instead with it's rival at the time, the Synclavier. :)
It's funny, I own the Arturia "virtual" CMI Fairlight, and after watching this video I opened my Arturia CMI Fairlight to discover that this Michael Jackson disk was an included sample.
Rory Kaplan was the one who played the Fairlight CMI on both the Jackson's Victory Tour and Michael's Bad Tour so this might be his disk he had made up I guess.
A melotron that cost about the same as a house. And these things where cheap compared to the synclavier. Seriously, in the early 80s a Fairlight would cost you about 50K pounds. You could buy a small house for cheaper. The Synclavier cost 10 times that for a maxed out rig. These keyboards where pretty much for the filthy rich. Now, you can get a VST plugin that'd blow them out of the water ten times over for a few hundred dollars. The price of using hardware 20 years ahead of the game, I guess.
@@shayneoneill1506 they where more for sound studios and universities. They where not really intended to be bought by individuals. It was completely out of this world when it was released but like you said not all that interesting for making music these days.
OMG I wish I can relive the moment of inserting a floppy disk in these old computers.. I was born in 1989 and I was fortunate to hear them in the early 90's... so nostalgic
I was born in 1971 and can remember using 5 and a quarter inch disks (on a BBC Micro), but I've never had the pleasure of using the comically large eight-inch discs of the Fairlight. He storage capacity must have been about 256kb or something ridiculous.
To demonstrate the capability of this thing, Def Leppard’s albums pyromania and hysteria (which set the standard for 1980s rock music) used the Fairlight heavily. Beautiful
You probably know this but that's because Amiga also used sound samples for its music and the composers probably would have got hold of whatever short length instrument samples they could get their hands on and I bet a lot of them were ripped from the CMI. That guitar at 3:18 in particular ;)
I used to have Alan Parson's old Series IIx, then in 1988 bought the Series III (at horribly great expense!). Page R was so ahead of it's time in terms of composition speed. I loved that you could say Copy Patterns 1,3,5,7,9 Bars A,C,D,F, instantly mapping out bars and bar segments, then group-combine them and repeat. It was so simple, you could more clearly think your way through the structure of the song, without a GUI of interminable clutter.
What makes it legendary is the fact that you can get the technology and sound architecture in maybe $400 worth of software, but if I could I would STILL get the real thing.
Lovely to see this instrument still working and being played technology moved very fast I purchased a Korg prophecy 5 not half the size of the fair light cmi yet produced some wonderful sounds I bought in the mid 80 s and it is still working
@@jessihawkins9116 they mean how cool it must have been to hear stuff like this back then. You need to remember. Before the CMI the idea of sampling a sound didn’t really exist
The MJ ''beatgong'' is the best I've ever heard except from the original one. The sustain at the end is a bit rough but that can be easily fixed. What a machine!
Your 1st sentence--- yes, sometimes old tech IS the best. But not this one Kort. 2nd sentence--- Are you fkng kidding me? These sounds are far from awesome. 3rd sentence is your only win-- Everyone loved this back in the day. Those days were the birth time of synthesizers and samplers, there was nothing else like this then, and so we all thought WOW! That lasted about 2 years. Kort, methinks you need to spend some quality time tuning up your ears.
@@lesizmor9079 - I guess we're all entitled to our opinions. Perhaps my nostalgia is getting the better of me, but I think this sounds pretty cool. Maybe not modern and top quality, but cool. ;')
The Rhodes 1 sound was also used by Roland in the S-50/S-550 as well as many other Roland keyboards and modules right up to the early 90s, I believe some of the Emulator samples possibly also came from Fairlight. But seriously imagine back in the early 80s saying "Mommy, Daddy I want a Fairlight for my birthday". I think the answer would have been "NO!!!!!!" Even many studios couldn't afford a Fairlight.
At one point, the official UK retailer of the Fairlight CMI was Peter Gabriel and there were only half a dozen of the machines in this country. They were all owned by famous musicians/studios backed by record labels. No children got one for Christmas.
Visually, the monitor, the keyboard, and those old diskettes (which I can't believe are able to function many, many years after they were rendered obsolete) make 1983 look so OLD. But I have to say I am impressed with some of the sounds, if, mixed into the rest of the production, probably passed for pop music pretty well in the '80s.
@@MonsieurSlick It does remind me of "How Fortunate the Man with None". I think the synth sound they used in that song was a roland Juno synth brass and also used a lot of Korg M1 for percussion on the album.
Jan hammer used it all over the MIAMI VICE T.V. Series soundtrack back in the 80s. That unmistakable 8 bit quality with lots of reverb and chorus is omnipresent on the backing score. He used page R in the software , which allowed you to use it to sequence both internal and (via an upgrade board), external gear. It was quite big with all the added bits (drives, keyboard, monitor etc) , and sounded like nothing else. The synclavier cost even more and was much higher resolution with fm synthesis and an aft ertouch sensitive keyboard, more memory, bigger hard drives and so on. Oddly enough there may be more complete surviving synclavier systems around now, than fairlights due to the build quality of the former. Trevor Horn, Daniel Miller & Frank Zappa owned them & you can hear them on dozens of albums by depeche mode , ABC , Seal , and many other artists.
I read someplace that the Fairlight incorporated analog filters into its architecture. Is that true, or was it purely digital? What about the Synclavier architecture?
Is there any love for the FM and additive synthesis of the Synclavier? The demos I see on RU-vid aren't particularly impressive, and the artists who famously used the Synclavier seemed to use the sampling exclusively. Considering the (comparatively) affordable analog synths on the market at the time, I imagine the early Synclaviers would have been a hard sell.
That Michael Jackson sample sounds sexy on this machine! I could think of a new song, using that sample. Beautifull piece of tech! I always enjoy songs from the 80's were this sampler is used in!
Cool! It cost like tens of thousands back then yes?, and for many sounds that we get on a small portable toy nowadays. Isn’t that amazing? Damn I was so f’in poor then. I could barely afford to eat, but loved synths so much. Still do. I only could dream about owning one of these, (or any serious programmable synth for that matter) back then. -Closest that I could get, was to hang around the local music shops and drool. I still love the music that hit the airwaves back then featuring such technology. It was a golden time of change, variety and imagination. Cheers.
Yeah, these days one can afford a virtual synthesizer for a lot less than what used to be the decent "cheap" synths back in the day, such as the Micromoog or the SH101. On the other hand, popular music is ruined. Possibly irreversably.
You got to take your hat of to this synth. Think of all the bits that came from this thing ? Also think of all the other synths that came along too after this. Today stuff is only like this now because of this wonder machine.
It also showed up on the Emulator and the Mirage, getting progressively more mangled due to resampling. The original version was quite pristine in comparison.
Actualy many of these sounds can be found in the Fairlight factory library. For instance the sample "BEATGONG", the sampled Synclavier gong, is the "GONGSYN" sample in the 1.4 library. But others as well, like "PETER1", "GMUFFA", "P1", etc...
In '86 I was already a gigging & aspiring musician. I remember thinking how amazing it would be to have a Fairlight CMI. I had a Fairlight tee-shirt, that was as close as I got. As I view and listen to this now and think about its $30K or more price tag (at the time), well it strikes me as being "a bit overpriced" in a way it didn't back then ;-) MiniMoogs, CS-80s, Matrix 12s, and Jupiter 8s all fetch more money now than their retail price when they were shipping. Pro samplers? … not so much.
yeah, I wasn't at a loss at all to understand why vintage analog synths have appreciated in value while hardware sampler prices are "pennies on the dollar" these days… just making the observation :-)
That's a light pen. You could get a Windows-compatible USB light pen all the way into the late 90's, early-zeroes, there was one company that still made them. I used to install them for dentists.
Many of these technologies are old. It is to make them useful and adopted by many in friendly way that may take time. Palmtop was like the iPhone much before, but iPhone added the great itunes with the many apps and added good product making and it was adopted by many. As for the mouse it was since seventies by Xerox, only for its own products, but in that case Apple, and later Microsoft followed with good adaptations for their products and was successful fast. What about touch pad? I think its good but could be much better use of it, so now mouse is more useful than touch pad most of the times. and what about electric cars? They are around for mass production certainly since the 50s or 60s, maybe much before.
I have a series lll sitting behind me....this is making me want to boot it up and play. I haven't used it in 10 years. I miss it but it's just such a large system, the display was fried, so it has to be daisy-chained to another monitor. I wonder if the flat panel VGA display cards are still around for a series lll and what they're going for? That would help. That Fairlight was a joy to work with.
I bought a used Yamaha keyboard from Goodwill for $25 that replicates all these sounds, along with a few hundred more. How technology is always advancing and rendering yesterday’s innovations obsolete is astonishing.
I can't think of few people who did better work with this instrument than Kristian Schutlze and his band Cusco. The sound of this instrument- and its successor the CMI III- are all over his records. And some of them were recorded just with the Fairlight.
I am sooo amezed about this amezing hardware alone considering it’s features wich were mind blowing at the time , and those recorded samples sounded very good despites being 8bit.
Amazing... as I first heard about the Fairlight as a young aspiring musician, I was completely blown away. It was like absolute magic, the stuff electronic music dreams were made of. Something I could never afford even if I lived for a thousand years. And now as I am listening, I am like... oh... hm... this stuff sure hasn't aged well.
An excellent demo :) Well filmed, good audio, interesting content, deserve much more popularity than the other Fairlight ugly demos ;D You should do a special video about the Michael Jackson disk you have (if you still have the fairlight, I read it was sold ^^)
I love the Martyn Ware comment after they purchased a 2x in 83 for heaven 17 and for months building their own samplelibrary on it as soon as they came to mixing they came to the conclusion it was all unuseable due to lack of high frequencys and sidebands
