The Fairlight CMI wasn't the first, but it was probably the most influential sampler on the planet. It arrived at the end of the 1970s and grew in influence massively during the 1980s. It came to define an era of popular music.

I remember poring over magazines, adverts, and interviews about this stunningly futuristic machine. Peter Gabriel was the first to make a record with it, Kate Bush ran it up that hill, and you could feel it in Nile Rodgers's work on Duran Duran's "The Reflex." It brought a style and technique of production and remixing that was fresh and exciting before saturating itself into overuse, over-meddling, and cliché.

But how did this peculiar Australian machine take over the music industry?

Early Days: QASAR

At the tail end of 1975, Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel decided to start a little business to "make the world's greatest synthesizer". The plan was to explore the digital control of what were then analog synthesizers. They shared a fascination with computers and music making and were keen to use emerging microprocessors to recreate and control acoustic sounds. In a rather uninspiring move, they took the name "Fairlight" from a hydrofoil ferry that they regularly saw skimming the water in Sydney Harbour.

Not much happened until they met Tony Furse of Motorola, who built a synthesizer for the Canberra School of Electronic Music based on a pair of 8-bit Motorola 6800 microprocessors. The QASAR M8 was limited in scope, but had some interesting ideas. Ryrie and Vogel licensed the design and set to work developing it into something approaching a usable instrument.

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A year later, they produced a bulky, complicated science project, with a huge processing unit, keyboard, and screen. They called it the QASAR M8 CMI, or Computer Musical Instrument. It had eight voices, but the approach was about analyzing and replicating harmonics to synthesize sounds that could then be controlled like an acoustic instrument, and in so many words, it wasn't going well. During the development, Peter built an analog-to-digital converter that allowed them to record or "sample" sounds into the computer for analysis. They discovered that their machine could not only play back the recording from memory, but also shift it in pitch across a keyboard.

At the time, it wasn't really what they wanted because it offered very little control outside of a bit of envelope shaping. They felt it wasn't real synthesis—somehow, they thought, this was cheating. However, they quickly realized that, despite the control limitations and primitive sound quality, they were definitely onto something.

Fairlight CMI Series I

In 1979, Peter and Kim emerged from their basement workshop with the stunning Fairlight CMI. With its bright green display and lightpen technology, the VDU brought over from the QASAR gave it an iconic '70s-futuristic look. The box was half the size of the original and contained the ADC/DAC hardware, dual microprocessors, and memory for sampling and synthesis. Storage was available via 8-inch floppy disks capable of holding 500kb of data. The Fairlight CMI originally shipped with a disk of 22 orchestral instrument samples and came complete with a musical keyboard for playing the sounds alongside a QWERTY keyboard for interacting with the software.

Despite the revelation and impact of sampling real sounds, Kim and Peter still pursued the synthesis side of digital processing, which got them here in the first place. Using the lightpen, it was possible to draw waveforms and manipulate them over time. You could draw a start and end waveform and ask the CMI software to interpolate between the two, giving you interesting evolving textures. Fairlight included a form of additive or harmonic synthesis as well, which was based on the idea of recreating sound with over a dozen harmonically related sine waves. These sound sources, coupled with frequency and amplitude envelopes, offered a lot of scope for synthesizing sounds.

The mixture of computer technology and music gave it the unique ability to appear both on television programms about music and shows about science and innovation. It famously appeared on the BBC's science series Tomorrow's World, where it was referred to as an "orchestra in a box" with the potential for unlimited sounds. Musicians were very troubled by this new development. The Musicians Union, who were already fighting synthesizers for stealing the jobs of musicians, believed the Fairlight was a "lethal threat" to its members.

However, the Series 1 didn't really live up to the hype of replacing real musicians. You only had 16kB of memory to play with, and to push the sampling time to over a second, you had to pull the sample rate down to a very fuzzy 8kHz. The Music Compositional Language (MCL) that you used to program sequences was largely impenetrable to non-engineers, and the whole machine had a certain clunk to it. It lacked the sort of control and expressiveness that musicians brought to the table, and so was considered more of an experimental oddity than a threat to real players, at least for now. The price tag of around $25,000 meant that it wasn't exactly going to become commonplace. But, potentially, it could be transformational to the right creative mind.

Fairlight found the right creative mind in England, in the head of Peter Gabriel, who was the first person to grasp the potential of the Fairlight CMI. Up until that point, all audio recording had been to tape. Tape was fragile, took time to set up, and was very linear. Similar tape-based instruments like the Mellotron, which had a loop of tape behind every key, required a lot of maintenance, and making new tapes was a huge undertaking. With a Fairlight, you could sample a sound, and it was there, on the keyboard, ready to go. You could store them and load them up again in seconds. At the time, the idea of saving sounds on a synthesizer was still very new.

Gabriel loved the machine and set up a company called Syco Systems to import and distribute Fairlight in the UK. He sold one to his friend and collaborator Kate Bush, who used the sampled sound of breaking glass in her 1980 release, "Babooshka." This is generally regarded as the first time the Fairlight was heard on a hit record. Gabriel used it extensively on his third solo album and supplied other machines to the likes of Trevor Horn, Thomas Dolby, and Alan Parsons.

Peter Vogel continued his tour of studios with the prototype Series 1 and found his way to the USA, taking orders from Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Jan Hammer, Todd Rundgren, and Joni Mitchell. Fairlight was set, and the first hand-built machines rolled out of the workshop and travelled across the globe.

Fairlight CMI Series II

The Fairlight duo didn't have time to rest on their laurels, as they discovered that when you sell expensive gear to successful producers, you can expect some robust feedback. The biggest difficulty with the Series 1 was the MCL—its complex computer language. While you could store up to 50,000 notes on the Series I, the MCL interface made it complex and laborious to edit. The Fairlight inventors weren't accomplished musicians; they were engineers, and the programming language style of the MCL reflected that. So, when it came to building the Series II, released in 1982, they knew they had to come up with a simpler way of sequencing the music.

The solution became known as Page R or the Realtime Composer/Rhythm Sequencer. It was a revolutionary, screen-based sequencer where you could add and edit graphically represented notes that ran in a stream from left to right. It introduced quantization and the idea of looping bars or patterns of bars and opened up a completely new way of producing tracks. This was years before the arrival of computer-based sequencers such as C-Lab Notator or Steinberg Cubase. With 16 voices to play with, a better sampling rate of 32kHz and an increasingly large library of sounds, the CMI Series II became a compositional tool as well as a sound source.

Kate Bush fully embraced the Series II and built tracks like her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill" exclusively in Page R. Other famously Fairlight tracks include "Moments in Love" and "Close (to the Edit)" by Art of Noise, "Shout" by Tears for Fears, "I.O.U" by Freeez, and Trevor Horns work with Frankie Goes To Hollywood's debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome.

I remember having the opportunity to play on a Fairlight CMI Series II at University in the early 1990s. My most vivid memory is discovering that all the sounds Jean Michel Jarre used on his 1986 track "Moon Machine," which I had as a B-side to "Rendez-Vous 4," were taken directly from the included library.

From the Series II era came a sample that would become iconic and forever associated with the Fairlight sound. It was called ORCH2, although it is often erroneously referred to as ORCH5. In fact, it's called ORCH5 often enough to make me wonder if I've got it right, but my understanding is that the library was very fluid, and somewhere things got renamed or mistakenly identified. Anyway, it was perhaps most famously used on Afrika Bambaataa's 1982 single "Planet Rock," and once you hear it, you'll find it all over the place. The sample came from the opening orchestral strike of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird suite. Peter just happened to find a recording of Firebird on his shelf when they were looking for things to sample to create more sounds for the Fairlight's library. It fit perfectly into the half-second of sample time they had available. The "orchestra hit" has become part of our musical culture, and you'll even find a version of it as sound number 56 in the General MIDI sound set.

The Series II received several updates along the way. The Series IIx included the addition of MIDI ports and moved to the newer 6809 Motorola processors. However, with digital and computer technology rapidly evolving all around them, it wasn't long before competitors began snapping at their heels. The Synclavier II from New England Digital cost substantially more, but was able to work with 16-bit sampling and could sample direct-to-disk with sample rates of up to 100kHz. E-mu Systems released their first Emulator sampler in 1981, but it was very basic even when compared to the Series I. The Emulator II, released in 1984, caught up to many of the technological features of the Series II and was about a third of the price, making it hugely popular amongst more modest studios and producers. And so it was time for a Series III.

Fairlight CMI Series III

Seemingly wholly oblivious to the eye-watering cost, the Series III made its debut in 1985 and became the de facto standard for a digital sampling synthesizer workstation. It was light years ahead of the previous systems. It matched the quality of the emerging CD market by sampling in stereo at 16-bit and 44.1kHz (up to 100kHz in mono) across 16 channels. The memory had a massive boost from 16 kB to a whopping 14MB, giving you over 2 minutes of sampling at 48kHz. The software and graphics had an overhaul, moving away from the classic '70s green-screen VDU towards a more modern OS with icons and a window structure, although most functions were still operated on a command line. The chunky lightpen was replaced by a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet and stylus to the right of the QWERTY keyboard.

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The Fairlight's computer brain was running Motorola's OS-9, capable of multi-task processing. The Series III used a pair of 68000 complex instruction set computer (CISC) processors to handle the performance and waveform processing while offloading to a series of 6809 8-bit processors to do the individual voices and number crunching. It was quite a super-computer in its own right and could even do word processing and handle business software tasks alongside music production. It had a single 8" floppy drive, which was considered much more reliable than the newer 5.25 and 3.5" floppies, and an option for a 70 or 110MB hard disk. At launch, it could still only sample into memory, but over time, they introduced direct-to-disk recording, which gave you over eight minutes in stereo. Later, external SCSI hard disks could be added and daisy-chained for over 40 minutes of recording.

Each of the 8 or 16 voices (depending on your version) had its own voice card with 16-bit converters, a digitally controlled filter, and an amplifier. You could add further voice racks to push it up to 64 voices. The four MIDI output ports put the Series III at the centre of your studio, controlling all your other synthesizers. It was also able to read and generate SMPTE timecode, so it could sync up to tape machines.

The Series III had three different compositional environments. First, you have an expanded and enhanced version of the Series II Page R, called RS. It's a pattern-based rhythm sequencer and musical drum machine that can combine quantized and real-time performances and capture pitch, velocity, duration, and release on each note over 16 channels. Next, you had the newly developed CAPS (Composer, Arrange, Performer, Sequencer) system, which was a polyphonic sequencer with compositional tools and mixing automation. It was MIDI-based and could run 40 independent polyphonic parts from the Fairlight or external MIDI instruments and 80 continuous controllers. And finally, the MCL was still tucked away in there for people who like to write music using a programming language. You also had a real-time effects page, mixing, waveform editing, Fast Fourier Transforms, harmonic analysis, and the largely overlooked additive synthesis abilities.

It was an extraordinary machine: innovative, ground-breaking, and Fairlight's first real “studio in a box.” All that technology and the fact that the machines were still being hand-built in small numbers was reflected in the price. The Series III started from around $60,000, but more commonly, the rich and famous paid over $100,000 for an expanded system.

One area that benefited from the power of the Series III, and in particular the SMPTE time code reading, was sound-to-picture applications. Jan Hammer is quoted as saying that he could turn around an episode of Miami Vice on the Fairlight in about five days. That's all the background music placed and synced to the action perfectly, something that would normally take weeks.

Identifying music made with the Series III is a lot more difficult. Sampling had become commonplace with the arrival of some very affordable alternatives like the Akai S900, E-mu Emax, Roland S-50, and Ensoniq Mirage. Around this time, I had both a sampler and a MIDI sequencer on my Commodore 64, and it wouldn't be long before Cubase and C-Lab on the Atari ST brought the compositional innovations of Fairlight to the masses. The technology behind sampling was getting cheaper and more accessible all the time, and along with the factory automation used in manufacturing by their much larger competitors, it began to erode the pedestal on which Fairlight had found itself.

The Fall + the Future

By 1989, sales had plummeted, and Peter and Kim couldn't compete with the changing landscape of cheaper music technology. Fairlight CMI folded later that year. Kim Ryrie went on to found Fairlight ESP (Electric Sound and Picture) to build products for film post-production. Interestingly, they were bought by Black Magic Design in 2016, which is why the audio side of their Davinci Resolve video editor is called "Fairlight."

Peter Vogel returned to the business in 2009 with a company called Fairlight Instruments and built the Fairlight CMI-30A 30-year anniversary edition. It was intended to combine the best of the Series IIx and Series III into an FGPA-based, 24-bit sampling machine packed full of the power of nostalgia. Unfortunately, due to legal questions over the ownership of the name, production has been suspended since 2017. However, in 2013, Peter released a software Fairlight CMI app for iOS, now called the Peter Vogel CMI, which contains over 500 sounds from the legendary library.

The sounds from the Fairlight library have continued to fascinate, and you can find versions of them in several places. Musician Tomas Mulcahy has much of the Series III factory library mapped and looped in various formats available for download for free. A superbly detailed collection is also available from BitleySounds.

If you are looking for the full Fairlight experience, then the best choices I'm aware of are QasarBeach from Adam Strange and the CMI V from Arturia.

QasarBeach is built to simulate the original Series IIx CMI software and doesn't make any attempt to emulate the hardware, converters, filters, or signal paths. It can import the original library and has the interface nailed down to a tee. It has 16 stereo voices, full voice editing, the legendary Page R sequencer, waveform generation, and synthesizer elements of the harmonic additive synthesis processes. It has the added bonus of supporting many other sample formats, so you can import libraries from many other samplers.

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The CMI V from Arturia is part of their amazing range of vintage instrument emulations. Again, based on the CMI Series IIx, Arturia has faithfully reproduced the look in the virtual interface but with plenty of modern enhancements to make it more accessible. The sample editing is all there, although it doesn't actually sample, as are the additive and harmonic synthesis aspects, along with the ability to use Fast Fourier Transform to analyze samples and manipulate them through harmonic profiling. Arturia has emulated the original's analogue filter response but not any other hardware elements. It comes with 600 samples and a number of presets. They've added a Spectral synthesis mode, beefed up the Page R sequencer, and included a bunch of effects and modulation possibilities. It is very well done indeed.

Much of our modern workflow, tools and technology owe their existence to what Fairlight brought to the table in the 1980s. For the best part of a decade, it completely changed how we made, recorded and produced music, and you can hear it in the tracks of the time. Its legacy lives on in the DAWs we use, the sound libraries we access, and the way we work with digital audio, even if the classic orchestral hit is considered a bit passé.