Only 50 Fairlights were ever sold in Britain. My friend Mikey bought one in 1984. You can't imagine how excited I was when he let that slip one afternoon in the pub. Anyway, over to him… "5 things that made it great to own a Fairlight:
Page R: The simple built-in sequencer had novice Fairlight owners creating gawky funkless Thomas Dolby within minutes. The inflexibility of the interface had them creating uncannily similar funkless Thomas Dolby tracks up to two years later.
The light pen: No fiddling with mouse or keyboard, just point at something on screen and it’s selected. Cool!
Waveform drawing: Everything you drew sounded like a door buzzer, but it was a waveform, and you drew it. Art directors of William Gibson adaptations throughout Hollywood took note.
The giant floppy disks: They were huge. They made you feel like a mad scientist. They were surprisingly hard to lose.
The Household Name Factor. Even people that know almost nothing about music technology are impressed if you've got one.
5 things that made me feel stupid for buying a Fairlight:
Resale value: I bought mine in 1984 for £23,000. I sold it, in 1986 for £7,000. I used that seven grand to buy an Atari 1040ST and a Roland S550 that outperformed the Fairlight in every way, and I had enough left over to pay the VAT man.
The Weight: It was huge. The two keyboards weighed enough on their own, and you only ever used one really. Then there was the unbearably primitive CRT that threw out evil radiation that heated your fillings up, and that’s before you faced the sheer Neolithic bulk of the CPU. Like an oceangoing fridge-freezer. For dwarfs.
All the stuff you’d paid for, but didn’t understand: The main sequencer page, the synthesis pages – who the hell understood them? And how much less would it have cost if they’d left them off?
The Sampling: The first sound sampled into a Fairlight was a dog bark. Apparently so were all the others. Everything that went in came out sounding more-or-less like a dog bark. Or more accurately, a grainy 8-bit sample of a dog bark.
Mockery from Atari owners: People with a 520ST, an Akai S900, and a cracked copy of Cubase could run rings round us Fairlight owners more-or-less weeks after we’d shelled out the price of a cottage in the provinces on our electronic wonder-boxes. And they weren’t quiet about it.
... [MORE]
My friend Neil once went to Fairlight HQ in Sydney. I asked him what it was like, and this is what he told me:
"As a teenager in the 80s, the Fairlight filled me with religious awe. It was the ultimate signifier of synth-pop stardom. I remember Nick Rhodes drawing waveforms with the light pen in Duran Duran's Arena live video, projected onto a gigantic screen so that all the audience could share the wonder. And then there was the sheer decadence of stars taking their Fairlights on Top Of The Pops, to mime with. Oh what a sleazy thrill. If only I could touch one, then greatness would surely be mine.
"My chance came when I was visiting Sydney, aged 16. I looked the company up in the phone book, and duly turned up in their reception the following day. I claimed to be researching a thesis on synthesized sound. Despite the fact that I was wearing a denim jacket with a corduroy collar, a rising-sun-of-Japan muscle shirt and MC Hammer pyjama pants, they appeared to believe that I was an adult.
"However, I abandoned any pretence of intellectual detachment when a charming Aussie led me into the Fairlight demonstration studio. It was lit like a harem, and full of seductive beauties. A Fairlight II, one of those huge Kurzweill keyboards, assorted Jupiter 8s and their ilk… and then I saw her. Shiny, new, and sheathed in the white plastic that everyone now has on their iPods. It was the Fairlight III. I emitted an audible squeak of joy.[This is Fairlight founder Peter Vogel with the same Series III Neil squeaked over, in the Fairlight demo studio, in 1986]
"My brain became so overloaded that I remember almost nothing of the subsequent demo. (Something similar occurred during the hot night in Bangkok a couple of years later when I lost my virginity) The only moment that I can recall was the last one: my host loaded up a sample of a 747 taking off, and stood back to allow me to press my sweaty fingers onto the mighty keyboard. A gigantic roar emanated from the studio speakers, panning viciously from left to right. I pressed more keys, and more mighty jets arced across the stereo field. Again… again… ggrrrraaarrrrrgghhh…
"Now, my rational side tells me that, given a bit of judicious downloading, I could achieve the same effect today using my laptop. But my heart tells me that, on that day, I heard the voice of God."... [MORE]
The weird thing about the Fairlight is that it now seems so primitive that modern music gear doesn't come close to reproducing it. It's a bit like comparing a Ferrari with a horse and cart, then wondering why you don't get that cool 'clip clop' sound.
The Fairlight interface was most like an early '90s Amiga or PC tracker - an eight track sequencer, triggering monophonic 8-bit samples (with the option of hardcore hexadecimal-input composing). Syntrax runs on a mobile phone and is far more sophisticated. Ironically, the only modern software which comes close is Ableton Live 4, with it's basic built-in sample player and 8-track drum sequencer/sample player. So, here's how you build your own Fairlight Series II for free:
Download the original Series II sound disks from the brilliant Hollow Sun archive, and you've got most of the famous Fairlight sounds, in super-gritty 8-bit.
Download this super-duper Fairlight wallpaper (adapted from an image created by Fairlight super-god Greg Holmes)
In honour of this Fairlight Series III turning up on Austrailan Ebay (currently £814, but it will go up), I've declared this Fairlight Week, a celebration of the biggest, most expensive, cleverest and most over-the-top vintage synth of all. 5 things I didn't know about the Fairlight CMI:
The name comes from this boat, a hydrofoil which sails across Sydney Harbour to Manley. Inventors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie were looking out of the windows of their harbour-front offices, trying to think of a name for their new machine, and there it was.
The first synth Kim Ryrie designed was the ETI 4600. ETI stood for Electronics Today International, a magazine founded by Kim which published instructions for the DIY synth. In Britain, it was known as the Maplin 4600.
The first digital synth that Ryrie and Vogel developed was the Quasar M8, a vast machine which used 2kw of power, was four feet long, took two hours to boot up, had 4k of waveform RAM and - by all accounts - sounded terrible.
Peter Gabriel was the first pop star to use a Fairlight. His brother in law became the UK distributor.
Kate Bush was an enormous Fairlight fan, writing 'Running Up That Hill' and 'Hounds of Love' on one. "I took one look at it and said, 'This is what I've been looking all my life.' I couldn't believe the Fairlight. It's called a synthesizer, but many of its sounds are of natural source. To be able to play with strings, waterfalls, anything you want, it's wonderful."
This is the new Fairlight Dream Suite - yes, it's the same Fairlight, still based in Australia. I have to admit that I don't understand any of the words in the Harmony Central story about it, but it's something to do with sound for film. There isn't even a price, you just lease the machine from Fairlight for $1,750 a month. Somehow, I can't get all that excited...
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Fairlight inventor Peter Vogel (who owns the domain name anerd.com) has posted a huge archive of audio clips - demo tapes, interviews and strange things sent in by users. If you're a historian of naff sounds and clunky drum programming, you'll be in heaven. There are a few strange delights, like a bizarre section recorded by David Vorhaus, friend of Delia Derbyshire and the man who recorded Orch 4, the most famous preset ever. (Picture: Ulrich Rutzel at the Fairlight) (Via DVDBorn)
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I just spotted this nice comment on my Engadget story about the Technos Axcel: Gocy writes: "I used to have a friend in the eighties that had one of these things, he was 17 and he had a fairlight II as well. He was the shadiest m.f. I've met and his fairlight used to crash all the time. Never knew how he got the cash. I remember this was like an astromic sum of 15,000 USD or more. I heard he got put in jail later for trying to stealing his own fairlight in some insurance scam. I remeber him trying to show me how the Acxel converted a sampled sound to synthes and it came out completly different or can I say turd like."
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Michael Ouellette writes: "Hey Tom, I'm a geek who previously didn't know anything about the Fairlight - your recent posts about it have fascinated me! Thanks!
"Anyway, I'm watching the new Duran Duran video last night, and I see that Nick Rhodes is playing what looks like a Korg MicroControl and a Powerbook sitting on a table, and I think about how much times have changed that players can replace a huge keyboard stage rig with a notebook and a midi contoller, blah blah blah.
"So, I keep watching the video and realize that the 'table' the Korg and Powerbook are sitting on is a Fairlight keyboard! And it looks like he's playing the Fairlight keyboard, not the smaller Korg one.
"Now, I realize that it's only a video, but I was jazzed to see it. Do you think it's just his way of giving a nod to the past, for the benefit of us eagle-eyed geeks? Or is there a chance that he's actually using the keyboard in his rig?" I don't know, Michael, but thanks for spotting it. Perhaps Nick is out there and can let us know? (And maybe explain why he's secretly been replaced by a crudely-drawn manga animation in his video?)
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This man is David Vorhaus. He's the man who, in 1979, sampled a full orchestra playing a short chord into a Fairlight Series I. He was friends with Peter Vogel, and his sample became ORCH5, the most famous preset sound ever. It's this [tiny mp3],an ochestral stab, which was used on dozens of 80s records (and there's more than a hint of ORCH5 in the new Destiny's Child single). In April 2004, Robert Fink, associate professor of Musicology at UCLA, presented a paper called "The Story of ORCH5". He talked about the use of ORCH5 in Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock' (for which programmer John Robie played an 8-finger chord with the sample). After a while, he concluded that "John Robie’s ORCH5 blasts capture, perhaps by accident, the sad revenant of European classical music in a single digital sound. They are classical ghosts, trapped in the hip-hop machine."
David Vorhaus was in White Noise with Delia Derbyshire. I've never heard them, but judging from the reviews here and here, I'd like to. David owns a VCS3, serial #0001 which is the first ever synth built in Europe. In the pic he's playing his Kaleidophon double bass-inspired synth controller. Read David's story here.
What's the coolest music gear brand in the history of the world? OK, Moog and Gibson and Fender, but then... Fairlight. Since their Nick Rhodes-fuelled '80s moment they've been making a lot of boring high-end media gear, but now there's this: the really absurdly awesome Xynergi Controller. Each key has tiny individual LCD display in it - as you can see in this awesome demo video (or this one). Estimated price? $28,000. It's been done before on the equally expensive Euphonix MC, and it does make the Optimus Maximusquerty qwerty (sorry, Joel) keyboard with colour key caps look quite reasonable at $1500. The knobs round the display are also slightly reminiscent of the PPG Realizer or, more prosaically, the Arturia Origin. (via Gearslutz)
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On Wednesday (28th June), Peter Gabriel's Real World studios is launching a remix competition, based on the multitrack from 'Shock The Monkey.' Stef from Real World says: "The sample pack is pretty much a who's who of your fave retro synth
and studio tech including Fairlights, Prophet 5's, Linn Drums, Ground
Hum and Headphone Bleed etc..." Shock the Monkey was recorded in 1981-2, and was the first thing Peter made with his new Fairlight CMI: "I'd been dreaming for some time of an instrument that could sample stuff from the real world and then turn it, make it available on a keyboard. Larry Fast told me that he thought he'd heard rumours of such an instrument. It was £10,000 which seemed an unearthly amount of money, got very excited with this thing, it's called the Fairlight. I spent a lot of time then collecting sounds going to factories and the university, getting interesting samples that were then used on that record and the ones after, it was really one of the key things that gave that record a different sound."Here is a QT clip of Peter talking about recording the track.
On wednesday, you can download the samples from Real World Remixed, which is also has multitracks of various world music things. The competition runs until the end of September, and the winner gets a SSL Duende - the £1,000 console-in-a-box which Chris at Analog Industries is lusting after.
PS: Here is the story of how Peter Gabriel spent time at Georgia State Uni trying to teach Bonobo monkeys to play keyboards.
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This is a wonderful clip of Herbie Hancock, demonstrating his Fairlight on Sesame Street in 1983-4. The little girl at the start is Tatyana Ali, who went on to become Ashley in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and the geek in the background is Clive Smith, who didn't. At around the same time, this is how Herbie looked on Saturday Night Live, with an Rhodes Chroma (+ the expander), a black Fairlight, and several band members in jumpsuits.
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MT reader 'Synthetic' was at the NAB show in Las Vegas a couple of weeks back and saw this incredible signed Fairlight CMI keyboard, which will be auctioned for the human rights charity Witness later in the year. The names read like the guest list for the Music Thing summer barbecue: Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Jean Michel Jarre, Jan Hammer, Daryl Hall and, bizarrely but wonderfully, Billy Gibbons. Visually, it's strangely reminiscent of this... UPDATE: More on this at the wonderful DVDBorn Blog here.
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This is a tiny, one minute long clip of someone using the 'Page R' sequencer in a Fairlight. Lots of keyboard clacking, then a very long gap as the floppy drive searches, then a cruddy-sounding sequence. Magic! More on Page R here.
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Thanks to Squeezyboy for pointing me towards eBay item #7350576206, a fourteen foot long MIDI keyboard. It starts at £2,000. This page seems to belong to the people who built the piano, complete with a fantastic video of it being played by some workmen. I guarantee it will make your day. It's the sort of thing that Jean Michelle Jarre would have played back in the day. In other keyboards-on-the-'bay news, #7349626808 is an original Fairlight II keyboard (like the ones seen here and here), currently just £60. I've spent a few days thinking I should buy it and turn it into the world's most awesome MIDI controller have it gather dust in house. Similarly, how cool would it be if I wrote MT on a Fairlight Querty Keyboard?
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Tommy has been reading up on Scientology ("Don't worry, I'm not thinking of joining"), and discovered Ron The Music Maker, a huge site dedicated to L Ron Hubbard's musical endeavours. Here is a touching love letter that he wrote to his beloved Fairlight CMI: "I am very glad to make your acquaintance. You have very charming circuits and I am certain that we can co-vibrate to the astonishment and ecstasy of a vast audience. With all praise to your exulted frequencies, consider me your friend.". Here is his fairly unremarkable synth collection. He was much more an organ man, owning an incredibly rare Yamaha FX3 - a huge and expensive FM synthesized organ from the '80s. He also had an awesome microphone collection, and a selection of banal but lengthy opinions about rock music.
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It's the sort of thing you normally see in a VEMIA auction: One person is currently selling two Fairlights (currently at £102 for the Series 2 and £52 for the series 3), one Synclavier (already £1,120) and a Maplin ETI 4600 (which as any Music Thing reader knows, is a big modular designed by Kim Ryrie, who went on to design... the Fairlight.) All these amazing synths are "cash upon pickup only in Box, Wiltshire, near Bath," which has lead several people (well, me and Rob), to assume that they're being sold by Peter Gabriel, whose Real World studio is in Box. In fact, they all belonged to Chris Hughes, who worked with Peter but is not him. Very, very excitingly: "the Fairlight 2 was the instrument used on Tears for Fears songs like 'Shout', and Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days"...
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Over on EM411.com, minisystem wrote a post asking "Is this the world's coolest looking synth?" about Modcan's 'B Series' modular synths (above) from Toronto. He's got a point, but the truth is white synths always look cool:
MT reader Adam lives in California, near Alan Parsons, who engineered 'Dark Side of The Moon' and lots more. Adam kindly picked Alan's brain for me, persuading him to write this list of his all-time favourite gear...
1. Neumann Km84 Microphone - good for anything except vocals.
2. Fairchild 660 Tube Limiter - great for vocals and bass.
3. Drawmer Noise Gate - although modern plugins can do the job
4. Orban or dbx de-esser for problem sibilance on vocals
5. Audio Technica AT 4033 Microphone. I've been using this as a favorite vocal mic. for years
6. Autotune when used tastefully. Most times it is overused
7. The Fairlight and the Linn LM1 Drum Machine changed the world. I worked with both. It's hard to imagine life without Sampling and Drum sequencers
8. A real orchestra with a great arrangement and a competent conductor. It saves hours and usually $$ too
9. Yamaha Motif XS synth. Easy to use and great sounds
10. Any DAW for time shifting tracks in either direction by microseconds or several minutes. This is a newly afforded luxury in the digital age
Up next: Alan's top tips for music making. (Picture via SoS)
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Only 50 Fairlights were ever sold in Britain. My friend Mikey bought one in 1984. You can't imagine how excited I was when he let that slip one afternoon in the pub. Anyway, over to him… 
My friend Neil once went to Fairlight HQ in Sydney. I asked him what it was like, and this is what he told me: 
"However, I abandoned any pretence of intellectual detachment when a charming Aussie led me into the Fairlight demonstration studio. It was lit like a harem, and full of seductive beauties. A Fairlight II, one of those huge Kurzweill keyboards, assorted Jupiter 8s and their ilk… and then I saw her. Shiny, new, and sheathed in the white plastic that everyone now has on their iPods. It was the Fairlight III. I emitted an audible squeak of joy.[This is Fairlight founder Peter Vogel with the same Series III Neil squeaked over, in the Fairlight demo studio, in 1986]
The weird thing about the Fairlight is that it now seems so primitive that modern music gear doesn't come close to reproducing it. It's a bit like comparing a Ferrari with a horse and cart, then wondering why you don't get that cool 'clip clop' sound. 
In honour of this Fairlight Series III turning up on Austrailan Ebay (currently £814, but it will go up), I've declared this Fairlight Week, a celebration of the biggest, most expensive, cleverest and most over-the-top vintage synth of all. 
This is the new Fairlight Dream Suite - yes, it's the same Fairlight, still based in Australia. I have to admit that I don't understand any of the words in the Harmony Central story about it, but it's something to do with sound for film. There isn't even a price, you just lease the machine from Fairlight for $1,750 a month. Somehow, I can't get all that excited...
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Fairlight inventor Peter Vogel (who owns the domain name anerd.com) has posted a huge archive of audio clips - demo tapes, interviews and strange things sent in by users. If you're a historian of naff sounds and clunky drum programming, you'll be in heaven. There are a few strange delights, like a bizarre section recorded by David Vorhaus, friend of Delia Derbyshire and the man who recorded Orch 4, the most famous preset ever. (Picture: Ulrich Rutzel at the Fairlight) (Via DVDBorn)
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I just spotted this nice comment on my Engadget story about the Technos Axcel: Gocy writes: "I used to have a friend in the eighties that had one of these things, he was 17 and he had a fairlight II as well. He was the shadiest m.f. I've met and his fairlight used to crash all the time. Never knew how he got the cash. I remember this was like an astromic sum of 15,000 USD or more. I heard he got put in jail later for trying to stealing his own fairlight in some insurance scam. I remeber him trying to show me how the Acxel converted a sampled sound to synthes and it came out completly different or can I say turd like."
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 2 comments Post a Comment 
Michael Ouellette writes: "Hey Tom, I'm a geek who previously didn't know anything about the Fairlight - your recent posts about it have fascinated me! Thanks!
This man is David Vorhaus. He's the man who, in 1979, sampled a full orchestra playing a short chord into a Fairlight Series I. He was friends with Peter Vogel, and his sample became ORCH5, the most famous preset sound ever. It's this [tiny mp3],an ochestral stab, which was used on dozens of 80s records (and there's more than a hint of ORCH5 in the new Destiny's Child single). In April 2004, Robert Fink, associate professor of Musicology at UCLA, presented a paper called "The Story of ORCH5". He talked about the use of ORCH5 in Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock' (for which programmer John Robie played an 8-finger chord with the sample). After a while, he concluded that "John Robie’s ORCH5 blasts capture, perhaps by accident, the sad revenant of European classical music in a single digital sound. They are classical ghosts, trapped in the hip-hop machine."
On Wednesday (28th June), Peter Gabriel's Real World studios is launching a remix competition, based on the multitrack from 'Shock The Monkey.' Stef from Real World says: "The sample pack is pretty much a who's who of your fave retro synth
and studio tech including Fairlights, Prophet 5's, Linn Drums, Ground
Hum and Headphone Bleed etc..." Shock the Monkey was recorded in 1981-2, and was the first thing Peter made with his new Fairlight CMI: "I'd been dreaming for some time of an instrument that could sample stuff from the real world and then turn it, make it available on a keyboard. Larry Fast told me that he thought he'd heard rumours of such an instrument. It was £10,000 which seemed an unearthly amount of money, got very excited with this thing, it's called the Fairlight. I spent a lot of time then collecting sounds going to factories and the university, getting interesting samples that were then used on that record and the ones after, it was really one of the key things that gave that record a different sound." Here is a QT clip of Peter talking about recording the track. 
MT reader 'Synthetic' was at the NAB show in Las Vegas a couple of weeks back and saw this incredible signed Fairlight CMI keyboard, which will be auctioned for the human rights charity Witness later in the year. The names read like the guest list for the Music Thing summer barbecue: Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Jean Michel Jarre, Jan Hammer, Daryl Hall and, bizarrely but wonderfully, Billy Gibbons. Visually, it's strangely reminiscent of this...
Thanks to Squeezyboy for pointing me towards eBay item #7350576206, a fourteen foot long MIDI keyboard. It starts at £2,000. This page seems to belong to the people who built the piano, complete with a fantastic video of it being played by some workmen. I guarantee it will make your day. It's the sort of thing that Jean Michelle Jarre would have played back in the day. In other keyboards-on-the-'bay news, #7349626808 is an original Fairlight II keyboard (like the ones seen here and here), currently just £60. I've spent a few days thinking I should buy it and 
Tommy has been reading up on Scientology ("Don't worry, I'm not thinking of joining"), and discovered Ron The Music Maker, a huge site dedicated to L Ron Hubbard's musical endeavours. Here is a touching love letter that he wrote to his beloved Fairlight CMI: "I am very glad to make your acquaintance. You have very charming circuits and I am certain that we can co-vibrate to the astonishment and ecstasy of a vast audience. With all praise to your exulted frequencies, consider me your friend.". 
It's the sort of thing you normally see in a VEMIA auction: One person is currently selling two Fairlights (currently at £102 for the Series 2 and £52 for the series 3), one Synclavier (already £1,120) and a Maplin ETI 4600 (which as any Music Thing reader knows, is a big modular designed by Kim Ryrie, who went on to design... the Fairlight.)
Over on EM411.com, minisystem wrote a post asking "Is this the world's coolest looking synth?" about Modcan's 'B Series' modular synths (above) from Toronto. He's got a point, but the truth is white synths always look cool:
MT reader Adam lives in California, near Alan Parsons, who engineered 'Dark Side of The Moon' and lots more. Adam kindly picked Alan's brain for me, persuading him to write this list of his all-time favourite gear... 
