I first heard about the Fairlight at MIDEM – this magic machine that could sample sounds – but very little additional information was available. . . . . .
I then spotted an ad in Studio Sound with a picture of the Fairlight and the strap line: ‘Fairlight C.M.I – Need We Say More?‘
Well, yes indeed: they needed to say more – I needed to call that number!
Having worked for several years as a brass player during the soul era, backing several American artists and working with many UK artists, with the advent of punk I decided to hang up my trumpet and look for a ‘proper job’ – before discovering that being a musician makes you the most unemployable candidate for a job in the music industry!
I ended up working for a production music library where apart from sales and promotion was actively involved in studio production.
This was a time when radio advertising was beginning to blossom and several highly creative production companies had sprung up who were already clients of mine for production music. My thinking was that is the Fairlight could indeed do what was promised it would be a boon for radio advertising.
So I called the number. I wouldn’t say that reception was warm, and I had to do a lot of persuasion even to arrange a visit to see the Fairlight and discuss my plans, as the company repping Fairlight in the UK, Syco Systems, had never heard of ‘library music’. They were really only interested in selling Fairlights to stars. (Later on, they confessed that it was very frustrating that so far, they had only sold to universities and educational facilities and to very few rock stars!) I was I believe the 7th purchaser in Europe.
Off I went then to Peter Gabriel’s studio in Bath where Fairlight distributor Syco Systems was then based. The demo was somewhat sketchy with more attention given to the amount of Angostura in the pink gins, but it was enough for me to realise that it had great potential in advertising.
My next task was to convince the management that what amounted to the biggest single investment in our department was worthwhile. Having been given the go ahead I then began the six-week wait for delivery but Syco were able to provide me with a typewritten manual which became exclusively my bedtime reading; reading it from cover to cover at least once a day! (Unlike many musicians, I am a great believer in manuals).
The Fairlight arrived in July, accompanied by Syco Systems’ distinctly eccentric engineer Philip Brain, resplendent in hippie-style paisley design shirt and velvet jacket – much to the horror of my rather straight-laced managing director! (When consulting him about a recurrent problem, the late Mr Brain actually asked me how often I talked to my Fairlight . . . . ).
Apart from the basic functionality of the machine – sampling, loading sounds, I also had the Music Composition Language software (MCL) (which was subsequently superseded by ‘Page R’) which was a command line editor where you could define the pitch, duration, gap time of sequences. Up to eight concurrent sequences could be loaded into a part and up to eight parts to a complete piece – but you could only listen to the result after compiling the individual sequences, so if you had missed out a comma, mis-typed a pitch or note duration you would have to go back and go through each sequence to spot the error – I had no printer! I remember doing the first movement of Vivaldi’s Spring from the Four Seasons to a deadline for a film whilst suffering from flu! What larks! I also programmed The Flight of the Bumblebee into the Fairlight using MCL for an ad which was quite an undertaking!
I should also mention that the Fairlight was a nightmare to transport – I was unable to lift and carry the CPU on my own and then there was the keyboard and screen with its delicate light pen to deal with. (The Four Seasons session was at Majestic Studios in Clapham where the control room was in the projection room of an old cinema . . . and no lift!).
Bear in mind this was a Mk1, and as far as I can gather had been largely designed without much consultation with musicians (and especially with keyboard players as the piano keyboard was the worst I have ever encountered). On an early sampling experiment I discovered the first major problem . . . .
Although the Fairlight could sample from 10k to 31.5k, we had no means of ascertaining what sample rate to set, in order that a pitched sample (say a middle C) appeared on the keyboard in the right place. To know this, you needed to know the frequency of the pitch x 128, divided down below 31500. So for example – one that I remember – the sample rate for G was ‘25088’ which is 196×128. Now remember that this was before the Internet and I spent some time tracking down a pitch-to-frequency table, (published for reasons unknown in a hi-fi magazine!). In a later software revision, Fairlight added a page where you could select pitch-related sample rates.
One other popular misconception, which I fear remains to this day: the Fairlight wasn’t a synth in any practical sense. Yes, you could draw waveforms on the screen, but you wouldn’t want to. Yes, it could do additive synthesis, but again: it was so clunky… When clients asked for synth sounds, I’d actually had to rely on sampled synth sounds that I got – unless they wanted weedy harpsichords . . .
I think, Fairlight’s biggest problem in the early days was that they had this somewhat arrogant view that if you had a CMI, you didn’t need anything else. And that’s why they resisted MIDI for a long time. By the time the IIx came out, there were already cheaper alternatives. Syco were also somewhat laid-back and so support was patchy to say the least – you were pretty much on your own in finding solutions to the inadequacies of the instrument. (I needed to sync CMI to itself as some versions of Handel’s Watermusic where I needed more than the eight outputs. This was possible using a square wave but the Fairlight was very fussy about levels and it often didn’t work consistently, adding to the studio bill!). Steve Paine (Syco MD) organised occasional drinks evenings for us early adopters (including JJ Jaczalik, Hans Zimmer and I think Dave Vorhauus) but really I got the impression that they learned more from us than we did from them – apart, of course, from pouring the perfect pink gin!
Given that we are talking eight-bit sampling, there were things it could do well and others where it was not up to the job. In practical terms, no multi-sampling so a sample spread across the keyboard could give unwanted results! I remember a session for Jeff Wayne who was pitching for a World Cup TV theme where he wanted to utilise a ref’s whistle melodically. Trouble was that it only sounds like a ref’s whistle at one pitch (f# if memory serves) and as soon as you alter the pitch, not only does the pitch itself no longer sound like a ref’s whistle but the pea slows down/speeds up! (Ken Freeman of Symphoniser fame was on the same session with a Synclavier and while I was trying to explain to Mr Wayne why his idea wouldn’t work as he imagined, Ken synthesized a much better whistle!).
The lack of transients in eight-bit sampling – even with short durations and higher sample rates (remember of course the Nyquist limit and all that) was obvious when I was booked to sample handclaps by a band that was too lazy to handclap through their album, and I was thrown out after the first half hour!
Similarly, I did a number of sessions for Madness (Driving in my Car and also TOTP re-records for House of Fun). These went well with the exception of trying to record a van door slam in the carpark under Air Studios which however we approached it remained a dull thud!
There were however a number of successful sessions with other artists.
But, back to the advertising side of thigs . . . .
The reaction to the Fairlight in advertising and allied audio-visual media was, to say the least, an uphill struggle. There was a lot of ‘Well, who else has used it?”. Furthermore, the Fairlight was misunderstood as a universal ‘music generating machine’. I well remember, whilst doing some banal session playing tunes on potato chips or corks or whatever, being asked by one agency person: ‘Can you do Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday?
At one point myself and the excellent (and much missed) keyboard musician Tim Cross (Oldfield, Adverts, Dana Gillespie) with whom I worked on many many Fairlight sessions tried to do a ‘mini tour’ of ad agencies to demonstrate the potential. Fortunately I did have access to a large amount of sound effects and most ofg the ad work was effects-based. Did a whole series of radio ads for Opal Fruits and a Sony award winng ad involving champagne corks.
Looking back I never seemed to get the Fairlight out of the farmyard! Dog barks, sheep, then crisp crunches, champagne corks . . . it was mostly fun – sometimes extremely frustrating and frankly, I don’t miss the Fairlight.
More Fairlight stuff can be found here on the excellent website For The Love Of The Fairlight
