The Wonder from Down Under: The Fairlight CMI Digital Sampling Synthesiser | Hacker News Reader

The Wonder from Down Under: The Fairlight CMI Digital Sampling Synthesiser

paleotronic.com

59 pointsempressplay27 comments

If anyone has one of these gorgeous machines (or knows someone that has one), please get in touch (email in profile). Through a very circuitous process I managed to score some of those 8" floppys Vogel made for the CMI in 1979 - would love to rip them for the Internet Archive and hear them in their original glory.

The gearslutz.com community may be able to help. There are many enthusiasts and threads on emulation and soundbanks.

Also, for fun, Herbie Hancock explaining a CMI to David Letterman. Around 4:50 if the link acts up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQgZmu4hZ0&feature=youtu.be...

Not sure where you are in the world, but if you / the disks can make it to Melbourne, I'd recommend reaching out to https://mess.foundation/. If they don't have direct access to one, they will almost certainly be able to help you track down someone who does.

The Vintage Synthesizer Museum in Oakland has one, I got to play with it. They might be able to do something with the disks.

Ah perfect! Will drop by as well as reach out to the Mess foundation in Melbourne!

You could always contact Vogel direct:

http://petervogelinstruments.com.au/contact/

or if you like the synthesiser, you could buy (part of) the company:

http://petervogelinstruments.com.au/invest/

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Edit: The website is also spruiking a $50 app which appears to be based on the original CMI source?

As well as Vogel's own CMI app, Arturia make a VST called Fairlight V which has most of the original sounds and does an excellent job of capturing the audio character of the instrument.

Chances are good the floppies are part of the original sample library, which is widely available.

They came with an invoice from Deram Limited in London sent to Roger Linn in Hollywood. Signed by Gloria Calbrath and John Styx. The invoice says the producer was Vic Coppersmith. Artist: Europeans. Invoice line items says it includes "ENC DEMO SAMPLES FOR LINN ELECTRONICS". Dated January, 1982.

The three disks are labeled:

1) "Ultranox drum sounds, Simmons Drums Sounds, Tom Severetts Drum Sounds"

2) "Freddie Perren's Drum Sounds"

3) "Audio Disk: Vic Coppersmith / Europeans"

All three disks are BASF 128 Bytes(!), 25 Sectors.

If you can point me in the direction of those original sample libraries I would be appreciate it, as it gives me a space to start parsing these!

"However, despite its deficiencies, Australian distributors and consumers were interested, so much so that the Musician’s Union warned that such devices posed a “lethal threat” to its members, afraid that humans in orchestras could be replaced!"

Funny how the music business in general can be such a bunch of Luddites. Player pianos, the phonograph, the Hammond organ, magnetic tape, synthesizers, digital recording... all of them were going to just kill music.

Now look around our own industry at those being extremely pessimistic. I'm sure you'll find many hawking their own politicized dire warnings.

News publications and media have always sought out the counter points to any news story, so they dont seem overly supportive. It just happens that it tends to be the loudest extreme voices that get the most attention to fill this contrarian role.

That said, it's usually safe to bet any extreme contrarian is likely a little bit right, which makes it hard to entirely dismiss them.

They didn't "kill" music -- which is impossible as long as it's an activity that has inherent value for humans -- but several of these inventions have dramatically changed the economic value of musical skills and therefore, to some extent, the viability of investment in developing those skills. That has second order effects on what kind of music can get made (and by who) and find its way into the culture.

Maybe a lot of these are reasonable tradeoffs. I sure love recorded music, even though it did hit the livelihood of gigging musicians. I like having an orchestra I can arrange for in my computer, even though it reduces the demand for studio musicians. I don't want to un-invent these things (nor do I think that's possible). But I recognize the impact and know that musicians who saw threats weren't wrong.

I do, however, want to uninvent Spotify and any services like it -- or at least radically change the cost structure. As they're now constituted, they're not a reasonable tradeoff; they don't really introduce a new opportunity, they're simply plays to combine the power of a new centralized distribution channel that has both broadcast and on-demand capabilities with arbitrage opportunities from externalized and/or sunk production costs and digital licensing loopholes to push the economic rewards for producing recordings down to fractional rates previous reserved for non-demand broadcast levels. Consumers love it, of course, because it's only marginally more expensive than piracy, more convenient, and has the imprimatur of legitimacy, but that's largely because services like Spotify are splitting some of the cost externalizations with us as they overall subtract value from the sector.

That's the huge irony of the Fairlight.

In capable hands it was an absolute wonder. But longer term, sampling has been a a bit of a musical disaster, making it easy to stitch together copy-paste music-by-numbers, and for a generation and a half of music consumers to persuade themselves that the cultural and economic value of music is limited to the marginal cost of copying a file.

The aesthetic changed from creative assimilation and active reinterpretation of musical ideas to patchwork assembly of mechanical reproductions.

Some people will say they're identical. That's wholly wrong - they aren't at all. While it's possible to make sample-based music with creative flair (e.g. Amon Tobin) the technology also makes it hugely easier to generate floods of low-value musical mimicry.

Music is one of those things that can have a very high-quality top end, and a very low-quality low-end. It doesn't really matter, ultimately the 'quality' is in the ears of the perceiver. So much great stuff now considered standard once started out as someones messy dross... its a wheel that turns, and rapidly!

>It doesn't really matter, ultimately the 'quality' is in the ears of the perceiver.

Only if one thinks that "anything goes" and doesn't believe music and lyrics has any importance for the cultural development of society (and the personal development of the listener).

Which is quite a modern idea...

I think there is a sizeable community of musicians for whom "doing things different than the mainstream" is a means by which important cultural development occurs. In fact for them, its probably more important than playing at the status quo.

And I don't think this is a modern idea. Music never stays in a single place.

>I think there is a sizeable community of musicians for whom "doing things different than the mainstream" is a means by which important cultural development occurs. In fact for them, its probably more important than playing at the status quo.

Yes, sadly there's a culture of novelty for the sake of it, as opposed to depth.

Your novelty and my depth are entirely subjective realities.

Sadly, that's the modern understanding of arts.

How certain are you of that?

? But it happened. Older musicians tell me about a time (1960s and before) when they had several gigs each day - playing in dance halls, radio stations, clubs, tv stations, studio work.. Now venues can just turn on the radio or CD etc. People write music on their computers. How many places where people dance has a live band with actual musicians? (No, DJs don't count) By the sound of it, there's virtually no gigs nowadays compared to back then. Those things you mentioned didn't kill music, but live music, actual musicians, have a vastly reduced role in society (in the West at least) compared to 50 or 100 years ago. I understand why the Musician's Union would be worried.

> People write music on their computers

I'm perfectly fine with that. Computers can be musical instruments and even if they don't take years to master to get a tone or a riff out that does not diminish the accomplishment, which is all about creating original sounds, not about how those sounds are made.

People creating "computer music" are a mix of composers and producers, but not players which is a totally different piece of work. Apart from live DJs, but there's very few of them doing anything on stage that could be called "playing an instrument".

Musicians are one of the first groups to adopt new technology, and they're also one of the most stalwart of groups when it comes to keeping old technology around.

Take MIDI, for instance. It took a while to get rolling, but its still around, and still actively being used, 40 years later.

The synth market: another great example. Musicians will easily spend 1000's a month on the latest toy - they'll also spend equal amounts of money on 30 year old technology.

Its one of the most endearing markets in which technology can be marketed and sold. There are certain sweet spots in the synth market which, when you discover them, can guarantee your continued presence in a very fickle, very populist realm.

(Disclaimer: been making music technology for decades. Its still a rocket-ride and roller-coaster, in one package. Nothing beats getting stuff on the market, to be pilloried for a while - until a few start to 'get it' - and then becomes standard-fare and toy-de-jeur...)

>Funny how the music business in general can be such a bunch of Luddites. Player pianos, the phonograph, the Hammond organ, magnetic tape, synthesizers, digital recording... all of them were going to just kill music.

Ever heard of the Spotify Top 20?

Those technical advances did eventually kill music (depending on one's point of view of what music should be, which for none of those musicians included Nicky Minaj and MIDI-orchestration -- they meant live music played as opposed to sequenced or reproduced).

There were hundreds of thousands professional musicians in the first half of the 20th century, and technology actually killed their jobs.

It turns out the demo/warez group of the same name, which I'd guess far more users here have probably heard of, did get its name from the synthesiser:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_(group)

The group and its members also have an interesting history.

I was sold when I saw the early version of the touch screen:

"a light-sensing 'pen' which can tell its location on the CRT by synchronising with the video signal"

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