Fairlight: Australian musical instrument

The Fairlight CMI is a computer musical instrument. It is a digital sampling synthesizer. The musical instrument is believed to be designed by the founders of the Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie in the year 1979 and based on a dual-6800 microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia. The musical instrument became popular in the year 1980 and competed in the market with synclavier that is from New England Digital.

source of picture: www.retrothing.com

The Fairlight is said to be a development of an earlier Qasar M8; this is an attempt to create sound by modeling all the limiting factors of a waveform in real time. But unluckily, this was beyond the processing power of the day so the result was not encouraging. Vogel and Ryrie in an attempt to make something out of it, decided to see what it can do with a natural recorded sound wave as a starting point, but to their greatest surprise, the effect of the attempt was incredible and remarkable and as such the digital sampler was created. The two decided to settle upon Fairlight. The Fairlight CMI series 1 was demonstrated in United Kingdom, United States and in Australia by 1979 and at this time, the sound quality was not quite up to professional level because it was having only 24 kHz sampling. It was like that until the series 2 which was held in 1982 when it was rectified and MIDI was added with series 2x in 1983 and in the 3^rd series which was in 1985 that the CD quality sampling was added. One of the best features that were added to the Fairlight was the “page r” software which has a graphical sequencer that was introduced in the second series. This is always one of the main reasons why most artists use this software. The Fairlight was built to run its own operating system which is QDOS and was given a menu-driven GUI. This was the basic system that was used in a number of Motorola 6800 processor with separate cards that deals with a particular part of the system such as the keyboard interface and the display drive. Light pen was the main device which was used to interact with the machine and could be used to select the options that are presented in the monochrome CRT display. The 3^rd series dropped the light pen interface and picked up the graphic tablet interface that was built into the keyboard.

The success of this instrument made many other firms to introduce sampling. In 1981, New England Digital modified their Synclavier digital to do sampling. In 1985, a sampler company that exists in United States introduced the Ensoniq Mirage and made the price very well affordable for every musician for the first time.