Fairlight CMI :

The Fairlight CMI  or computer musical instrument is a digital sampling synthesizer. This midi computer was designed in 1979 by the founders of Fairlight, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. The Fair light CMI music computer is based on a dual-6800 microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse in Sydney, Australia. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed in the market with the Synclavier from New England Digital.

Fairlight CMI History:

The Fairlight CMI was a development of an earlier synthesizer called the Qasar M8.  Fairlight CMI synthesizer attempted to create sound by modelling all of the parameters of a waveform in real time. Unfortunately, this was beyond the available processing power of the day, and the results were disappointing at best. Vogel and Ryrie decided to see what it would do with a naturally recorded sound wave as a starting point. To their surprise the effect was remarkable, and the digital sampler was born. In casting about for a name, Ryrie and Vogel settled upon Fairlight, the name of a hydrofoil (named in turn after a suburb of Sydney).

Sound quality synthesis in audio production was not quite up to professional standards, having only 24 kHz sampling, and it was not until the Series II of 1982 that this was rectified. In 1983 MIDI was added with the Series IIx, and in 1985 support for full CD quality sampling (16bit/44.1 kHz) was available with the Series III.

The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (a modified version of the Motorola MDOS operating system) and had a menu-driven GUI. The basic system used a number of Motorola 6800 processors, with separate cards dealing with specific parts of the system, such as the display drive and the keyboard interface. The main device for interacting with the machine apart from the keyboard was a light pen, which could be used to select options presented on a monochrome CRT display.

Fairlight CMI Sampler:

The sampler is the heart of the Fair light composer synthesizer. It’s a 16-bit resolution digital midi sampler with variable sample-rates up to 100 kHz. Original Fair light CMI models used two standard 8 bit 6800  CPU processors, updated to the more powerful 16 bit 68000 CPU chips in later versions (the IIx had updated 6809 processors, which is what designated it a IIx over a II, and raised the sampling resolution to 32 kHz, from the I & II’s 24 kHz). In the Fairlight III, sample memory (RAM) comes in 28 MB chunks per 16 voices of polyphony – wow! That’s plenty of room for creating stereo or mono samples. Edit them using various hi-tech functions and at a ‘microscopic’ level using the large Monitor screen. Samples can be looped, mixed and re-sampled with processing for sweetening. As for synthesis, create your own wave forms by sampling and applying Fast Fourier Transform and Waveform editing functions. Storing samples and synthesized wave forms can be done to Hard Disk or 8″ floppy disks.

Fairlight CMI Versions:

From 1979 to 1985 several versions of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer were produced, with the Series III being the last of them. Each new series added updates to the Fairlight as technology developed through the early eighties. The Fairlight CMI 1 and 2 had only 16 kByte of Memory per voice, and only eight voices but expanded to several megabytes and double the polyphony by the Fairlight III. The IIx was the first Fairlight CMI to offer MIDI. The Series III added after touch capability to the keyboard. They all had pitch/mod wheels, an 82-key alphanumeric keyboard, 15 function keys, a Graphics Tablet for drawing sounds and a Video Monitor for seeing what you’re doing while editing.

Fairlight CMI Influence:

The success of the Fairlight CMI midi computer caused other firms to introduce sampling. New England Digital modified their Synclavier digital synth to perform sampling, while E-mu introduced a less costly sampling keyboard, the Emulator, in 1981. Producer Tony Mansfield used the instrument heavily on the B-52’s album “Bouncing Off The Satellites”. Whilst the band initially disliked the Fairlight CMI, it ended up becoming useful. Guitarist Ricky Wilson died during the making of the album, and so the Fairlight CMI was used to make up for the lack of guitar parts on the album.Jan Hammer used the Fairlight CMI to compose the original soundtrack of the 1980s TV drama Miami Vice.

A new sampler company called Ensoniq introduced the Ensoniq Mirage in 1985, at a price that made sampling affordable to the average musician for the first time. Though the Mirage was essentially a poor man’s sampler with significantly inferior hardware specs, at less than $2000 it was nevertheless sufficiently powered (8-bit microprocessor) to signal the beginning of the end of the CMI. In addition to these low-cost dedicated systems, very cheap add-in cards for popular home computers started to appear at this time, for example the Apple II-based Greengate DS3 sampler card.

Fairlight CMI Specifications:

• Polyphony: 16 Voices (expandable)
• Sampler Core:  16bit, 100 kHz mono, 50 kHz stereo
• Memory  Size:  28 MB (several minutes at 44.1 kHz, expandable)
• Synthesis:  Fast Fourier Transforming, Waveform Editing, Graphics Tablet Waveform Drawing
• Date Produced:  1979 – 1992
• Original Price: $20,000 base price
• Effects :  No built-in Effects