Within the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required seems the disclaimer that “there is no such thing as a Fairlight on this report.” 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 might afford one. The machine might have price as a lot as a home, however for many who underneathstood the potential of playing and manipulating the sounds of real-life instruments (or of anyfactor else in addition to) digitally, money was no object.
The history of the Fairlight CMI is instructed 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 one among its musicians sampled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musicians, utilizing the technology not but largely often known as 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 method. Take the “orchestra hit” originally sampled from a report of Stravinsky’s The Hearthchicken (and whose story is instructed in the Vox video simply above), which quickly turned practically inescapable.
We would name the orchestra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” although its breathy, faintly vocal sample often known as “ARR1” additionally noticed a number of motion throughout genres. A want for these particular results introduced a number of musicians and professionalducers onto the bandwagon by way ofout the eighties, nevertheless it 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 documalestary above gathering sounds to sample, blowing wind by way of pipes and smashing up televisions in a junkyard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a special fervor, utilizing not simply its sampling capabilities but additionally its floorbreaking sequencing smoothware (included from the Collection 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 documalestary clip above. With its green-on-black monitor, its gigantic floppy disks, and its futuristic-looking “mild pen” (as natural a degreeing 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 device is a device, 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 Road (1983)
How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Outlined the Sound of Nineteen Eighties Music
Thomas Dolby Explains How a Synthesizer Works on a Jim Henson Children Present (1989)
How the Moog Synthesizer Modified the Sound of Music
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
