How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music
Within the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required seems the disclaimer that “there isn’t a Fairlight on this file.” Cryptic although it could have appeared to most of that album’s many purchaseers, technology-minded musicians would’ve received it. Within the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at the least the pop music created by acts who may afford one. The gadget might have value as a lot as a home, however for many who underneathstood the potential of playing and manipulating the sounds of real-life instruments (or of anyfactor else in addition to) digitally, money was no object.
The history of the Fairlight CMI is instructed in the video above from the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, incorporating interviews from its Australian inventors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. According to Ryrie, No Jacket Required actually did use the Fairlight, within the sense that one in every of its musicians sampled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musicians, utilizing the technology not but largely often called digital sampling would have felt like magazineic; to listeners, it meant a complete vary of sounds they’d never heard earlier than, or at the least never utilized in that method. Take the “orchestra hit” originally sampled from a file of Stravinsky’s The Hearthfowl (and whose story is instructed in the Vox video simply above), which quickly turned practically inescapable.
We’d name the orchestra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” although its breathy, faintly vocal sample often called “ARR1” additionally noticed a whole lot of motion throughout genres. A need for these particular results introduced a whole lot of musicians and professionalducers onto the bandwagon by means ofout the eighties, however it was the early adopters who used the Fairlight most creatively. The earliest amongst them was Peter Gabriel, who seems in the clip from the French documalestary above gathering sounds to sample, blowing wind by means of pipes and smashing up televisions in a junkyard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a special fervor, utilizing not simply its sampling capabilities but in addition its floorbreaking sequencing gentleware (included from the Sequence II onward) to create her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill,” which made a surprise return to popularity only a few years in the past.
The Fairlight’s high-profile American customers included Stevie Receivedder, Todd Rundgren, and Herbie Hancock, who demonstrates his personal model alongsideaspect the late Quincy Jones in the documalestary clip above. With its green-on-black monitor, its gigantic floppy disks, and its futuristic-looking “gentle pen” (as natural a degreeing gadget as any in an period when most of humanity had never laid eyes on a mouse), it resembles much less a musical instrument than an early personal computer with a piano keyboard hooked up. It had its cumbersome qualities, and a few leaned relatively too heavily on its packed-in sounds, however as Hancock factors out, a instrument is a instrument, and it’s all right down to the human being in control to get pleasing outcomes out of it: “It doesn’t plug itself in. It doesn’t professionalgram itself… but.” To which the always-prescient Jones provides: “It’s on the best way, although.”
Related content:
Watch Herbie Hancock Demo a Fairlight CMI Synthesizer on Sesame Avenue (1983)
How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Outlined the Sound of Eighties Music
Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Children Present (1989)
How the Moog Synthesizer Modified the Sound of Music
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
