Fairlight CMI

: 1971–1979 In the 1970s, Kim Ryrie, then a teenager, had an idea to develop a build-it-yourself analogue synthesizer, the ETI 4600, for the magazine he founded, Electronics Today International (ETI). Ryrie was frustrated by the limited number of sounds that the synthesizer could make. After his classmate, Peter Vogel, graduated from high school and had a brief stint at university in 1975, Ryrie asked Vogel whether he would be interested in making "the world's greatest synthesizer" based on the recently announced microprocessor. He recalled: "We had long been interested in computers I built my first computer when I was about 12 and it was obvious to me that combining digital technology with music synthesis was the way to go." : After six months, the pair met the Motorola consultant Tony Furse. • QASAR M8 CMI (1976–1978) by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogl : Vogel and Ryrie licensed Furse's design, mainly for its processing power, Sampling By 1978, Vogel and Ryrie were making "interesting" but unrealistic sounds. Hoping to learn how to synthesize an instrument by studying the harmonics of real instruments, Vogel recorded about a second of a piano piece from a radio broadcast. He discovered that by playing the recording back at different pitches, it sounded much more realistic than a synthesized piano sound. He recalled in 2005: Vogel and Ryrie coined the term sampling to describe this process. With the Fairlight CMI, they could now produce endless sounds, but control was limited to attack, sustain, decay and vibrato. According to Ryrie, "We regarded using recorded real-life sounds as a compromise as cheating and we didn't feel particularly proud of it." The Music Composition Language feature was criticised as being too difficult for practical use. One of those present for the demonstration, Stephen Paine, recalled in 1996: "The idea of recording a sound into solid-state memory and having real-time pitch control over it appeared incredibly exciting. Until that time everything that captured sound had been tape-based. The Fairlight CMI was like a much more reliable and versatile digital Mellotron. Gabriel was completely thrilled, and instantly put the machine to use during the week that Peter Vogel stayed at his house." : 1982–1985 The second version of the Fairlight CMI, Series II, was released at a price of £30,000 in 1982. The Fairlight CMI Series II became widely used in popular music recordings of the early to mid-1980s, CAPS An enhanced version of the Page R sequencer called Composer, Arranger, Performer, Sequencer, or CAPS, as well as Eventsync, a post-production utility based on SMPTE timecode linking, were also added to the Series III computer. However, while many people were still using CMIs, sales were starting to diminish significantly due to much lower-cost, MIDI-based sequencers and samplers including the Atari ST and Akai's S612, S900 and 1000 samplers appearing on the market. Paine stopped selling the CMI in the United Kingdom because of this. The Fairlight company was becoming more focused on post-production products, a market Paine had a hard time getting used to, and when HHB Communications Ltd took over distribution for the United Kingdom, they failed to sell any. ==Adoption==

Peter Gabriel was the first owner of a Fairlight Series I in the UK. Boz Burrell of Bad Company purchased the second, which Hans Zimmer hired for many recordings during the early part of his career. In the US, Bruce Jackson demonstrated the Series I sampler for a year before selling units to Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder in 1980 for US$27,500 each. Meat-packing heir Geordie Hormel bought two for use at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles. Wonder took his Fairlight out on tour in 1980 in support of the soundtrack album ''Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"'' to replace the Computer Music Melodian sampler he had used on the recording. Peter Gabriel's 1982 studio album also featured the CMI. In 1981, Austrian musicians Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader composed a symphony, Erdenklang – Computerakustische Klangsinfonie. This work premiered live on stage, using five music computers, during the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. In 1984, he released an album by the singer and songwriter Claudia Robot. (Phonogram) Her studio album Alarmsignal consisted of songs written by the female vocalist, with tracks produced by the Fairlight CMI. The first commercially released single in the US made with a computer, a Fairlight CMI, was Ebn Ozn's "AEIOU Sometimes Y" (Elektra 1983) – actually recorded in 1981–1982, along with their studio album Feeling Cavalier (Elektra Records 1984). Devo's 1984 studio album Shout heavily featured the Fairlight CMI at the expense of analog instruments. Gerald Casale later stated that Shout was the biggest regret of his career, "because the Fairlight [synthesizer] just kind of took over everything on that record. I mean, I loved the songwriting and the ideas, but the Fairlight kind of really determined the sound." Frontman Mark Mothersbaugh later used the CMI in the soundtrack of the 1991 children's television show Rugrats. The instrument is most prominently heard as the lead instrument in the show's theme song – it is the 'Swannee' sample with a low-pass filter applied. Australian singer John Farnham used a Fairlight CMI on his twelfth studio album, Whispering Jack, in 1985 and 1986. In an interview with Musicradar Yello’s Boris Blank describes the Fairlight CMI as the tool that completely transformed the band’s working process in the early 1980s. He says they bought their first Fairlight in 1981 with the help of a loan from Dieter Meier’s father, and from that point onward it became central to Yello’s music-making. Blank explains that his fascination with sound predates Yello itself: before using samplers, he experimented with tape loops, field recordings, and homemade editing techniques using a Revox reel-to-reel machine. When the Fairlight arrived, it allowed him to organize and manipulate sounds much more freely, effectively turning his long-standing obsession with recorded noises into a compositional method. Throughout the years, Blank built an enormous personal sample archive for the Fairlight — far beyond the often-quoted “100,000 sounds.” He jokes that the real number is in the hundreds of thousands. These recordings included everything from environmental noises to custom percussion and vocal sounds, many of which were sampled specifically for Yello tracks. He remained deeply loyal to the Fairlight even after newer samplers appeared. In the interview, Blank says he still considers its sound superior to many later digital samplers because of its warmth, dynamics, and especially its bass response. He also mentions preserving and transferring his old Fairlight library with the help of Fairlight co-creator Peter Vogel, with the intention of reusing and rebuilding those classic sounds in modern software workflows. ==Influence and legacy==

After the success of the Fairlight CMI, other firms introduced sampling. New England Digital modified their Synclavier digital synthesizer to perform sampling, while E-mu Systems introduced a less costly sampling keyboard, the Emulator, in 1981. In the United States, a new sampler company, Ensoniq, introduced the Ensoniq Mirage in 1984 for the price of $1,695, less than a quarter of the price of other samplers. In America, Joan Gand of Gand Music and Sound in Northfield, Illinois was the top salesperson for Fairlight. The Gand organisation sold CMIs to Prince, James "J.Y." Young of Styx, John Lawry of Petra, Derek St. Holmes of the Ted Nugent band, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and many private studio owners and rock personalities. Spokesperson Jan Hammer appeared at several Gand-sponsored Musictech pro audio events, to perform the "Miami Vice Theme". The ubiquity of the Fairlight was such that Phil Collins stated on the sleeve notes of his 1985 studio album No Jacket Required that "there is no Fairlight on this record" to clarify that he had not used one to synthesize horn and string sounds. Swedish warez and Commodore demo scene group Fairlight took its name from this device, which Jean-Michel Jarre used on some of his records. Experimental music group Coil considered the device unique and unsurpassed, describing using the Fairlight as "An aural equivalent of William Burroughs cut-ups". In 2005, the Fairlight CMI was inducted into the TECnology Hall of Fame, an honor given to "products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology." In 2015, the Fairlight CMI was inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia collection. In February 2025, an Australian documentary was released called The birth of electronic music: How the Qasar & Fairlight CMI pioneered computer music technology. It uncovered some previously unreported or misreported information about the Fairlight CMI. ==References==