Basic info

In the second task i will be talking about the Fair-light CMI and why it was so important in music history.

Fair Light developed in 1979

The Fair-light cmi was the first digital sampling synthesiser, it was first meant to be a synthesiser which you could draw in the harmonics of each wave however it quickly became clear that it was very hard to get any type of good sounds using this technique; which is when they accidentally thought to record a natural sound(found sound) and then they tried to edit the waveform of that sound via the monitor and touch pen from this they found out that it worked better with samples and from this they made the Fair-Light CMI more into a sampler rather than a synthesisor.

When the Fair-light came out it changed how songs were produced because you weren't just limited to instruments you could use virtually anything and with the help of the Fair-light you could make them in key with a piano which meant you could use them in your compositions. The user interface as well set it apart from synthesisers at the time because there were no knobs there was just a monitor and a pen which you used to point at the different setting you wanted(much like a touch pad); this made it very easy to move around the different menus.


The first fairlight sampler had 24khz sampling which was really not great and not up to standards with quality at the time, the updated one however in 1982 fixed the sound quality issues and later midi was introduced and finally in 1985 full 16 bit 44.1 khz was updated with series 3

Heres a  quick video on how a Fairlight CMI can be used to create unique melodies with "Found sounds".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ-lrVMxhMY&feature=relmfu

The fairlight ran its own operating system called QDOS



The Fair Light CMI could recreate whole orchestras, but to do that you had to record the said instrument playing middle c,  when Emerson didn't like the way an orchestra played part of the music for the movie, he reproduced the entire orchestra himself by sampling each instrument and playing in the notes back in with a midi keyboard.


The fair-light cmi used 8'' floppy drives and broke easily, it was very expensive to fix as well as parts were increasingly rare, ( a brand new fairlight cmi when it first came out was £30,000)


The fairlight cmi pioneered the use of sampling and sequencing because as well as being a sampler the Fair-Light also had a sequencer inside it which made it very easy to create songs within the program itself, which made it one of the first portable workstations ever; from this stemmed out all all DAW systems, such as pro tools cubase etc...

Sound Tools came out in 1989 and was a DAW system which was regarded as the first tapeless recording studio this was influenced by the Fair-Light CMI