Letter From Fairlight 1982

[dante]

In 1982 I sent away for a demo cassette of the Fairlight CMI - heres the letter I got with the cassette. I was already using a computer for music for a couple of years by then...but the CMI was the creme de la creme...

Fairlight Letter

letter from fairlight 2.jpg (104.34 KiB) Viewed 5326 times

[borg]

nice one! Already a millionaire back then? My latest bought software is the UVI darklight, which is a very inspirational tool to me, and does indeed have those sounds everyone will recognize from the eighties hits. It does have that 'lofi' 12bit sound that today's producers are looking for in bitcrushers and retro samplers. I love it.

It was more Zappa than the Yes, Gabriel, Bush,... that got me interested in this machine.

[Marco]

Please please send a mp3 file of the audio cassette!!! Very very nice interesting.
If you want 12 bit sound, try the yamaha fb01, I know this is not a fairlight.

[jksuperstar]

The latest iPad is pretty cheap, and can run the Fairlight CMI app, which is a processor emulator, so it really runs the original OS that the Fairlight had!

[Ambient Source]

I was lucky enough to use the one of the first fairlight's in europe for a few days in the early 80's, in the studio of Dave Vorhaus in London.
also in the background is the first EMS VCS 3 . I had a great time

[dante]

Please please send a mp3 file of the audio cassette!!! Very very nice interesting.
If you want 12 bit sound, try the yamaha fb01, I know this is not a fairlight.

These are the exact demo's I played in my car in the car park at work after picking up the tape in my lunch hour in 1982

http://anerd.com/fairlight/audioarchives/fa041.mp3
http://anerd.com/fairlight/audioarchives/fa042.mp3

Just Fairlight

just-fairlight.jpg (32.86 KiB) Viewed 5260 times

[Marco]

That is really a worthful documentary of time! Thank you for that!

[Nestor]

This things are so beautiful, they have such an amazing taste for us. We price too much the new, but this thing does still sound amazing, it sounds different and a really creative way, thank you for the picture!

[dawman]

Cool stuff.
Nice pic Ambient Source.

[kensuguro]

that's a kick ass demo. It's a huge undertaking really, they were trying to present a whole new way of producing music. And what we have now is still somewhat part of that roadmap.

[siriusbliss]

Someone built a Fairlight unit using an iPad and CMI Fairlight app.

https://ask.audio/articles/how-to-make- ... th-sampler

G

[kensuguro]

I think many times the importance is in the presented paradigm, rather than the sheer amount of required computing. I had a similar experience while studying graph (like nodes and edges graphs, not graphs as in graphs and charts).. The computations are not very scalable, but not super difficult.. but the types of problems the graph paradigm allows us to tackle is totally new. (hint: it's all the problems people don't want to compute) Left me wondering why graphs haven't become a standard data type like arrays and hashes. These new concepts that expand our problems solving space are so precious.