Within the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required seems the disclaimer that “there isn’t a Fairlight on this file.” Cryptic although it might have appeared to most of that album’s many purchaseers, technology-minded musicians would’ve obtained 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 machine could have value as a lot as a home, however for individuals who beneathstood the potential of playing and manipulating the sounds of real-life instruments (or of anyfactor else moreover) digitally, money was no object.
The history of the Fairlight CMI is informed 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 considered one of its musicians sampled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musicians, utilizing the technology not but hugely 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 means. Take the “orchestra hit” originally sampled from a file of Stravinsky’s The Fireplacefowl (and whose story is informed in the Vox video just above), which quickly turned practically inescapable.
We would 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 want for these particular results introduced a whole lot of musicians and professionalducers onto the bandwagon viaout the eighties, but it surely 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 documentary above gathering sounds to sample, blowing wind via 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 comfortableware (included from the Sequence II onward) to create her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill,” which made a surprise return to popularity just some years in the past.
The Fairlight’s high-profile American customers included Stevie Gainedder, Todd Rundgren, and Herbie Hancock, who demonstrates his personal model alongsidefacet the late Quincy Jones in the documentary clip above. With its green-on-black monitor, its gigantic floppy disks, and its futuristic-looking “gentle pen” (as natural some extenting machine 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 connected. It had its cumbersome qualities, and a few leaned somewhat too heavily on its packed-in sounds, however as Hancock factors out, a software is a software, and it’s all all the way 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 Street (1983)
How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Defined the Sound of 1980s Music
Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Kids Show (1989)
How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.